Step 1
Pick a title
Choose a game and set a date. You do not need a final headcount, now or later.
The mechanism
How it works
The app holds the secrets and runs the clock. Nobody has to sit outside the game to make it happen.
Nobody at the table knows the answer
In a normal boxed mystery somebody reads the solution while stuffing envelopes and then spends the evening pretending they have not. That person did all the work and gets the worst seat.
Here the murderer is not written into the box at all. When you press start, the app picks one from the suspects the story supports and tells only that phone. Your screen looks exactly like everybody else’s.
That means the evidence has to change too, and that is the harder half. Each mystery is written as one clue skeleton with several endings that all hold up, then checked so that whoever gets picked, the clues still point to exactly one person. If a version did not resolve cleanly, it never shipped.
How a night runs
Step 2
Invite your cast
One link goes to everyone. Guests claim a character from what is left and get their own booklet with a costume note.
Step 3
Press play
Everyone opens the app at the table. Evidence arrives round by round on each phone, and you get yours at the same time as everybody else.
Step 4
Name the killer
Everyone accuses and says why. Then the app reveals who actually did it, which is the first time anybody at that table finds out.
The app does not solve it for you
It hands out information and then gets out of the way. Nothing crosses a suspect off, nothing aggregates what has been shared, and there is no board filling itself in. You get a notepad and the person opposite you gets a different piece of the story.
Four people arguing about a timeline is the game. Software that resolves the argument would be removing the reason everyone came.
Six people or twenty
Every title states a range and holds at both ends. It is written once and checked at every headcount inside that range, so a table of six gets a mystery that resolves to one answer and so does a house of twenty.
Which matters most when two people cancel on the day. Mark them absent and the evidence they were carrying moves to people who turned up. Nothing to recut.
Two ways people use it
As the whole evening
Costumes, food, the full production. Two and a half hours, and people talk about it afterwards. This is what most of a cast expects when you say murder mystery.
As part of game night
Six people, no costumes, nobody doing an accent. It runs shorter at that size and asks much less of everyone. If your group is more comfortable with a game than a production, start here.
