Writer and creator's blog about our murder mystery games
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So how exactly did Murderous Acts! come about? Whose idea was it? Who encouraged it? Who influenced it? And who came up with suggestions for murder mystery characters? Well, the whole family did!
As a young family, we always enjoyed good murder mystery games and over the years held more than a few family murder mystery parties. We also enjoyed going away occasionally to posh hotels for family murder mystery weekends, where all the children could join in the fun watching professional actors act out murder mystery scenarios and would try to work out who committed the crime.
Before the age of the internet, we used to scour the shops for murder mystery party box sets. They were few and far between, but we found them, mainly in what was then a big well-known toy shop. These box sets, alternatively known as murder mystery game kits, provided hours of fun and entertainment with their amusing scripts, clues and cassettes to play to set the scene of the murder and at the end disclose who the murderer was. Cassettes! It wasn’t that long ago that the cassette came as an essential component of murder mystery game box sets, but what OLD technology it seems now! How far things have come!
Anyway, so we always enjoyed having murder mystery evenings at home, and one daughter, our middle child, Rebecca, started to show strong thespian talent from quite a young age, and it seemed that every special occasion, whether that be a birthday, Christmas, Halloween, end of the school year, or whatever, had to be celebrated with a murder mystery party for teens, for which all of my daughter’s school friends got excitedly into role for their murder mystery party characters.
And the parties got bigger and bigger, so we had to start looking for murder mystery games for large groups of people. Apart from the big well-known toy shop, there weren’t that many retail outlets that sold murder mystery box sets with all their various components, so as we entered the twenty-first century, we started to look for murder mystery games online.
Well, initially, we were rather disappointed with what was on offer in the range of boxed murder mystery dinner party games. Internet searches didn’t throw up very much, so we found ourselves in a bit of a hiatus for a while when it came to hosting murder mystery dinner parties. Just a few years later, however, we discovered one really good murder mystery game company that sold murder mystery games for kids and more 'sophisticated' murder mystery games for teens. Eureka! What a brilliant website! All praise to the writers of those games, as I think between my daughter and her teenage friends, we must have played the whole range. Rebecca held a pirate themed murder mystery party for her sixteenth birthday, and having caught the bug for murder mystery party games, her fabulous friends secretly arranged a masquerade murder mystery party a year later for her seventeenth birthday. It was particularly lovely of them because Rebecca had been suffering from long-term ME after contracting glandular fever. She had no idea about the surprise murder party. I had to source a murder mystery costume for her and drop her off at the venue under some kind of pretext. Subterfuge! But that’s what murder mystery party themes are all about! Anyway, I digress … with high hopes of becoming an actor, and indeed she did five years later with a First Class Degree in Acting, Rebecca was absolutely delighted to have a murder mystery dinner party thrown in her honour!
Pirate murder mystery party.
Pirate murder party.
Masquerade murder mystery party. Why that young man on the right didn’t go into acting, I do not know!
Masquerade murder party.
The budding actor loved dressing up in murder mystery costumes.Stumbling upon that particular online murder mystery party company was a stroke of luck that sparked further excitement in my daughter for buying boxed murder mystery dinner party games. As a budding actor, she just adored murder mystery role-play, assuming the personality of one of the murder mystery dinner characters, dressing up in costume, adopting an accent and being privy to that character’s 'dark secrets', all created and written by that fabulous murder mystery dinner company.And just as important, the murder mystery company we had discovered had a great range of murder mystery party ideas for adults. After all, it was us, the parents, who had discovered murder mystery dinner party box sets, and the idea just rubbed off on our daughter and her friends.So the enthusiasm continued, and we, the adults, held a Victorian themed murder mystery game, set in an old mansion complete with faux flickering candles and cobwebs. Yes, it’s amazing what you can find when looking for murder mystery party accessories. And it was so much fun dressing up in those period murder game costumes. One male guest and his wife mistakenly turned up in fine regalia from the previous century! Never mind, he certainly looked dapper in his frock coat and breeches and shiny buckled shoes and she just as stunning in her corseted dress, and they probably paid a fortune to hire those magnificent murder mystery game costumes!And then the actor daughter turned twenty-one. 'Oh, what should we do to celebrate?' we asked ourselves, racking our brains for further murder mystery dinner ideas! The one thing we hadn’t yet done, of course – a murder mystery dinner train! So I found a brilliant steam murder mystery train experience that just happened to be not too far from us, and I booked the event, inviting Rebecca’s fiancé along for the fun as well. Well, he came along with some trepidation as he didn’t know what he was getting into! We were wined and dined in the sumptuous restaurant car of a superb Edwardian steam train as it sped through beautiful countryside and stopped for a while to allow us to enjoy the glorious sunset over nearby lakes. In the meantime, our tables were visited every so often by sometimes pleasant, sometimes rude, often intimidating, mainly funny murder mystery suspects, who’d tell us a tale or two, answer some questions and deny that they committed the murder. At the same time, we were presented with the occasional clue to help us solve the murder. While most of us lost ourselves in gales of laughter and completely 'lost the plot' in this supposedly interactive murder mystery dinner event, our elder, exceptionally competitive daughter studiously examined the clues and subjected the suspects to various lines of questioning, culminating in her working out who committed the crime and providing the most accurate details as to why, how, when and where. She was delighted to be announced the winner when the murder mystery steam train chugged into its final station at the end of the evening. And Rebecca’s fiancé, though daunted by the prospect of having to engage with complete strangers, thoroughly enjoyed his initiation into our world of murder mystery events.Well, the above is a rather convoluted explanation as to how Murderous Acts! murder mystery games came about. The long and the short of it was, as a family, we loved to play murder mystery games and were constantly on the lookout for new murder mystery games to play at home, and eventually, we found we’d played the best murder mystery dinner party games and had just about exhausted what was available both in the shops and online. My next question was, 'where can I buy a murder mystery dinner game that I haven’t already played?'That was when I came up with the idea, probably under the influence of alcohol, of creating my own murder mystery party games for adults and the murder mystery game ideas just flowed. There were already a number of period murder games out there so I wanted to create some modern day murder mystery party games. I particularly wanted to create one set in the fashion world, as fashion themed murder games were rare. The kids and I started throwing around ideas for other murder mystery themes. The murder mystery game themes prompted possible names for the murder game characters. For example, being a lover of weddings, I definitely wanted to create a wedding themed murder mystery game, and the name of Carrie Thetrane just jumped into my head. And who else would play a prominent part in a wedding murder mystery game? The chauffeur, of course! Hence the name Abel Driver, who despite having one of the most innocuous names, was one of my more dubious murder mystery game characters. My husband joined in with character name suggestions. I couldn’t tell you now who came up with which murder mystery character ideas, as we were literally shouting them out, apart from two. My elder daughter, the competitive one, who won first prize in the steam train murder mystery event, came up with the name of Minnie Nockers, Senior Nurse in Calamity Clinic. I accept no responsibility for that name at all! And funnily enough, my son proudly came up with the name of
Sir Gerry Coster-Lott, Cosmetic Surgeon in the same murder dinner game. Matthew had spent a lot of time in and out of hospital, so the names of doctors and medical consultants were part of his everyday vocabulary. In fact, the murder game suspect, Sir Gerry Coster-Lott, was based on one of Matthew’s own consultants, who we had formed a particularly fond attachment to. The real consultant wasn’t a cosmetic surgeon, but he was, and still is, a very pleasant, jovial, larger than life character. My fictional Sir Gerry Coster-Lott is not as jovial as the real consultant, but then he does come under suspicion for murder, so who can blame him?!So I had some murder mystery dinner party ideas, some favourite themes and character names for my games. Then the real hard work started ...
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©2018 KM Pearce/Murderous Acts!