Kill Doctor Lucky is a board game designed by James Ernest and released in 1996 by Cheapass Games. In 1998, Kill Doctor Lucky won the Origins Award for Best Abstract Board Game of 1997.

Kill Doctor Lucky is, in concept, a sort of inverse form of Clue. Both games are set in a sprawling mansion full of colorfully named rooms and a variety of dangerous weapons and deal with the murder of the mansion's owner, but whereas Clue begins after the murder has been committed, and players compete to solve it, Kill Doctor Lucky ends when the murder is committed, and players compete to commit it.

Gameplay
The gameboard is a floor plan of Doctor Lucky's mansion, and it is accompanied by a deck of cards representing the objects and opportunities that can be found there. Players take turns moving through the rooms of the mansion and accumulating cards, while Doctor Lucky moves through the mansion following a predetermined path. A player may attempt to kill Doctor Lucky by playing a weapon card (such as a runcible spoon, a monkey hand, a letter opener or pinking shears) while the player's token is in the same room as Doctor Lucky and out of sight of all other players. Each weapon card has a certain point value, and certain weapons are worth more points when used in a certain room (for example, the trowel is worth extra points when used in the wine cellar, an allusion to Poe's The Cask of Amontillado).

At this point, the player making the murder attempt succeeds, and thereby wins the game, unless the opponents play failure cards of combined value equal to the point value of the weapon used. The situation is complicated by the requirement that players play failure cards in clockwise order, with each player having only one opportunity to play cards. Since it is to any player's advantage to eliminate failure cards from his opponents' hands, a large part of the strategy of the game consists in bluffing: when one player attacks Doctor Lucky, it is in your interest to persuade your other opponents that you have no failure cards in your hand, to attempt to force them to save the game by spending the required cards.

When played, failure cards are set aside and not returned to the deck. Thus, as the game goes on, fewer and fewer failure cards are in play. This not only builds tension but also forces the game to end in a reasonable amount of time, because once all the failure cards are gone, the next murder attempt cannot fail.


Other Notes
- This is among the most popular and successful games released by Cheapass Games.

- The failure card mechanic is a prime example of the game theory concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma, to the extent that it has become known among many gamers as "Kill Doctor Lucky Syndrome".

-The Craigdarroch expansion to the game was unavailable for a brief time after the current owners of the castle objected to the use of the estate's name and floor plan without permission. The expansion is now available in a form edited for gameplay reasons as part of "Kill Doctor Lucky: The Director's Cut (2002)". (A similar debate caused Cheapass Games to repackage their game "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond" as "The Totally Renamed Spy Game.")