Murder at the Piedmont

The last Wednesday of the month is game night. Tonight we had a murder mystery party. I looked into buying a kit but didn’t feel like spending the money when I didn’t know if the students would enjoy it.

I say about 75% or so got into the game and the ones that got into it enjoyed it. I made 50 character cards and used most of them. The game was pretty involved, but I think it might have been a bit too involved for them.

There were the obvious players, a dead person, a murderer, and everyone had some reason to kill the dead guy. Most people had alibis but a few didn’t. There were also assassins, mobsters, investigators, federal agents, smugglers, spies … each with their own objectives. For example, a police officer was investigating the mob and various players knew who the mob guys were, but only the informant knew who the head of the mob was and was only allowed to tell the police officer. The mob was supposed to find and take out the informant before he could share this information. The ATF agents were trying to identify and arrest the smuggler and Booth and Oswald (the assassins) were trying to find the entrance to the theater and a grassy knoll respectively.

I think there was just too much information for them, plus they didn’t really write down things as well as they should. One guy had it all practically solved. He had figured out who everyone was and narrowed the murderer to 4 characters before my final clue was revealed and that clue eliminated 3 of those 4 leaving the murderer, but he didn’t write any of it down so couldn’t remember whodunit.

I had lots of fun playing with the names to. With 50 names you need to have fun so I got some classic assassin names, some fun word plays and other such. For example, at one point I had, Frank and Bean which led to Rocky and Road and then Chunky and Monkey which made me think of Bones and then logically Jones.

Anyways, I’m planning on doing this again but I’m thinking of buying a party set to see how they plan things out before I try my hand at this again. If anyone is interested in the set I made I will make it available for free once I get a couple little things done to make it easier for others to use. I need to write up instructions and such. Let me know.