Murder Mystery Party Game
No dont worry, I am not about to confess to some heinous crime. This is the tagline on the back of a game we recently played with some friends, over dinner. We take it in turns to have dinner at each of our houses and I have now gone through my repertoire of meals I can offer guests who aren’t family. And as they are proper foodies (making her own cheese biscuits, pasta and bread for the relevant courses) I now need to come up with other ways to “Keep up with the Reynolds”.
Hey presto games to play to detract from the fact we have had steak and hand cut thrice thinged oven chips again. This time it was on a weekend away with them and our teenage kids when we went to Weymouth a few weeks ago, I knew that we would have a whole Saturday night to play a “proper” game rather than just “Go Fish” or poker. In fact I can’t play the latter with them as we met because the boys play poker once a week and I have no hope of remembering how the scoring works, and quite often exclaim “oooh I have got all the Queens” which is, apparently, not a great idea.
So board games it is.
The Murder Mystery Dinner Party Game from Paul Lamond is perfect for this sort of thing as it comes with everything you need:
- Recipe and music ideas
- Character booklets
- Place Cards
- Invitations
- Secret clues
- And a CD with an introduction, scene setter, summary of the events and the solution to the crime
We had to imagine the scene, it was 1942 and we were in Morocco (not difficult since we were in a safari tent) We were meant to be joined by France’s greatest mime artist but he didn’t show because
< insert dramatic drum roll >
HE HAS BEEN MURDERED
But by whom?
This became the premise of the next few hours as the ten of us worked our way through the game. I had handed out the character booklets earlier in the day so we had all had time to work out who we were meant to be and when we appeared for dinner we were “in character”. I chose to be Countess Bogov, an exiled Russian Aristocrat, obviously. Mr B was Monsieur Oily-Carte, a booking agent for the Moulin Bleu in Paris. Ditto obviously.
As dinner progressed we worked our way through our cards with our scripts, trying to work out just who might be the murderer in our midst. We also had some clues that were read out by characters at different stages, before we came to our thundering finale and working out which one of us was the culprit
It was so much fun, and the perfect way to spend an evening with people ranging from 15 to 55, with everybody having a role to play.
The instructions were all super easy to follow and the box came with everything we needed to help make it a great evening.
There are others in the range too so we shall definitely be trying those out on our next evening en masse!
As for whodunnit, well you’ll just have to buy and play it for yourselves won’t you?