ONE COURSE ULTIMATE MURDER MYSTERY DINNER PARTY

Last month it was about Belgium. This month I’ve written a murder mystery party that’s over in half an hour. Let’s go.

WEREWOLF

Werewolf is a party game. It is sort of the party game, for nerds, in as much as basically everyone’s played it at least once and the rules are easy enough to explain and the kit requirements are basically nil.

It was originally called Mafia (the lycanthropic variant only emerging in the late 90's), which lacks some of the whimsy in my opinion, so I prefer to keep it lighthearted and play the version where supernatural manbeasts are tearing us to pieces in our beds.

For the sake of completeness, I am going to explain the rules of Werewolf, although you already know the rules for Werewolf.

- Players are divided into two teams - Villagers and Werewolves. There are usually three villagers for every werewolf, or thereabouts. 

- No-one aside from the werewolves (not counting the GM) knows who the werewolves are - everyone is, ostensibly, a villager.

- The aim of the game is to kill the other side whilst not dying. 

- Villagers kill people by publicly voting for someone to be put to death once per day.

- Werewolves kill people by secretly picking someone to die during the “night” by pointing at them when everyone else’s eyes are closed.

That’s the basic version. It’s a bit straightforward, so over the years we’ve included all sorts of new roles in addition to villagers and werewolves: doctors who can save people from being killed by secretly selecting them during the night, traitors who can’t do werewolf stuff but count as a werewolf for scoring purposes, seers who can ask the identity of one player per night, and so on. 

Now: Werewolf is a terrible party game.

It actively encourages not only lying to each other's faces - which some people, myself included sometimes, can get excited about - but, moreover, not talking.

The most sensible course of action in any game of Werewolf, for the villagers, is to shut up and vote for someone at random to be killed every day. The odds of you hitting the werewolves are just as good, if not better, than if you listen to people and get led around by the nose. (Shirley Jackson had it right - a lottery is a much more sensible bet.)

Which means that you spend most of a game of Werewolf not talking to each other and not doing anything, which is a bit rubbish when it comes to a category of games that includes classics like Spin The Bottle, Pinfinger and Slapsies.

The other problem with Werewolf is that it takes fucking ages. You need at least six people to make a game of it, and anyone playing can’t really leave for long during play, so you’re locked in until one side has eaten and/or hanged the other. If you want to keep up a lie, it has to hold up for at least forty-five minutes under interrogation from multiple very incentivised people. It’s stressful and often unfun and difficult to do.

Enter: One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

LIKE WEREWOLF, BUT FASTER

One Night Ultimate Werewolf came out about a decade ago, I think. Firstly, it’s GMless, and the entire thing runs off an app, so everyone can take part without having one person stuck facilitating the whole thing. Secondly, and much more importantly, it only has a single day and night cycle.

Everyone’s assigned a role, as usual - this time, they’re neat little tokens that are all the same on the back, rather than the usual scraps of paper scribbled on in pen. Then you put your token face down on the table in front of you and close your eyes. Then people fuck with who’s got what, peeking at tokens and swapping them around, until - really - none of you have any clue as to what you might be. You might be the werewolf. You can’t be sure.

THEN. You have three minutes to work it out. If everyone explained exactly what they did and told the truth, the group could identify the werewolf pretty easily - but they don’t, cause they’re incentivised not to, and one person fibbing can throw the entire thing off balance. 

If you want to lie, you only have to do it for three minutes! It’s great! You can spin all sorts of bullshit. You can fast-talk. You can contradict yourself. There’s no time to pay full attention. Werewolves are agents of chaos and villagers are desperately trying to reverse-engineer the events from bad information - which is broadly the same as the normal version, but you don’t have to do it all bloody night, and you can take much broader swings.

I like One Night Ultimate Werewolf quite a lot. None of my friends like it, unfortunately, which makes sense because it’s innately confusing and combative and they’d rather, I dunno, just talk to each other? Like animals? But we persist.

LIKE WEREWOLF, BUT MORE COMPLEX

Here is an incomplete list of all the other hidden role games I have played that I can recall.

THE RESISTANCE, available both in old timey medieval and European-lookin’ cyberpunk flavours, which spearheaded an advanced version of the familiar hidden role game - one based around selecting a team for a mission, and hoping that you could fill out that team with sufficient numbers people on your side so it shakes out the way you want. It means that you lose the player elimination part of the game, but it does mean that if you flub it and someone outs you as a traitor early on, there’s a lot of sitting around and shrugging to be done.

SECRET HITLER is a great name and a fine enough game. The teams are liberals and fascists; you have to vote fascist doctrine into law (which works identically to the mission format in The Resistance), and then get the player who is Secretly Hitler into the role of Chancellor, and then you win. The theming is very hands-off - there’s no particulars on what the fascist policies are, just that they’re fascist - which is a good thing, because, you know. This one we managed to win (unfortunately I was on team fascist, but I’m taking it), and I was blitzed out of my gourd, so maybe getting loose enough to believe my own lies was a good idea. 

I remember - in a stop-motion, blurry kind of way - lying directly and audaciously to someone sat next to me about my allegiances, and he could tell I was lying, but no-one else at the table clocked me and they were all on board. I dismissed his entirely sensible - indeed, objectively correct! - suggestion that I was a villain without much in the way of evidence, and folk bought it. It felt electric. Like I’d strongarmed reality into the shape I wanted it to be. I can see why gaslighting is so popular with emotional abusers. I figure I’ll keep it as a sometimes treat whilst I’m playing pretend. 

TWO ROOMS AND A BOOM is a bigger affair, for around thirty players - two teams, two rooms, a president, and a player with a bomb. One team wants to get the president in the same room as the bomb at the end of three rounds. The other team wants them to be in different rooms. You can trade a few people between rooms each round.

One of the core things about hidden role games is that, for the game to work, you can’t unhide your role. If you show me a card that says “Villager” on it, you’ve ruined the experience. You shouldn’t even reveal it after you’ve been killed. Everyone has to distrust everyone else and no information can be absolute - aside, possibly, from a list of what character types could be in the game. 

I started the session of TRAAB by immediately revealing my blue team card and yelling “HEY HELLO I’M BLUE. If you’re blue, come and show me your card and you can be on my team. Otherwise you can fuck off.” I had, at this point, perhaps not thought enough about games design to understand that what I was doing was making the game broadly unplayable and shifting it from “Hmm, who is this person, what is their true allegiance, what bluffs and double-bluffs can we spin upon each other?” to “Show me a blue card or fuck off,” which is less immediately engaging.

However, this confidence meant that the blue team elected me as a leader, which was a terrible plan, and I believe that we lost.

BLOOD ON THE CLOCKTOWER has really become a whole thing since it came out a few years ago. I admire what the makers have done - they’re friends of a friend, and I gave them some scant advice on their first Kickstarter campaign which means I’m taking a tiny fraction of the responsibility for their massive success - but crumbs if I don’t enjoy playing the game very much. 

It operates pretty much like Werewolf: there’s a village, there’s a cult infiltrating it and summoning demons, you gotta kill ‘em before they kill you, etc. There’s a bunch of different scenarios and demons to deal with.

But! They put in a GM role. Not just a facilitator, like you’d have in Werewolf (even though I called them a GM earlier); the GM makes choices and steers the game towards a balanced state, ensuring that both sides have a chance of winning. 

The GM introduces an additional level of uncertainty to a genre where useful information is already pretty thin on the ground. One of the mechanics we had was Poisoned; if you were Poisoned, there was a chance that anything you did using a character ability (protecting a person, trying to assassinate someone in the night, asking someone’s allegiance) would do the opposite of what you wanted, and you had no clue if it were the Poison what done it (or if someone subverted it, or if the target was immune) - if the GM decided it would be more interesting to invert it, that’s what happened.

Something about that sets my teeth on edge. It takes the hidden role game - a frankly stressful experience where you are pitched against your friends - and puts a capricious god at the centre of it who can fuck up your day if they feel like you’re doing too well. (At one point, they just pick someone to die and don’t have to explain who did it.) 

I think it’s a mix between being a competitor and a player. In hidden role games, I’m expecting to be a competitor - I’m trying to win by any means necessary within the rules, and so is everyone else. In a LARP, which I think BotCT is veering towards, I’m trying to make the experience as exciting for myself and everyone else. (I love NPCing in LARPs. It’s liberating. Everyone should do it. I think the overall experience of LARP would be greatly improved if there weren’t any players at all.)

Anyway. I hear that the vast majority of Blood on the Clocktower groups are merely excuses to form and expand polycules, so more power to ‘em. 

A MURDER MYSTERY PARTY, in my house, at the age of 13, in which I was dressed as a Vicar. I had a secret identical twin who killed me after the first course - a fact identifiable by the way that my ostentatious costume jewellery ring changed hands. The event was organised by a friend of my mum’s whose agoraphobic husband had written the whole thing and recorded his in-character sections as the Detective on tape so she could play them aloud. 

I was not listening to the plot because, and I remember this acutely, earlier that day I had purchased my very first Citadel Journal from Games Workshop in town and I wanted to slope off and read the Warhammer Quest rules for Ogres, written by Gav Thorpe. I didn’t know anything about Warhammer Quest! I was trying to work out what a “Power Roll” was from first principles. Fascinating stuff. I think Gav Thorpe has been a much bigger influence on my career than murder mysteries ever have.

A SECOND MURDER MYSTERY PARTY, at the age of 14. I can’t even remember who I was in this one, but we played it on the distant outskirts of Newcastle in my aunt’s Big Renovated House. At one point my mother’s friends got into it. You have to understand: it was the 90’s. We didn’t have Netflix back then, or vapes. There was nothing else to do.

Murder Mystery Parties are a curious egg. The game is different from the other ones I’ve mentioned; it’s not about artfully hiding your involvement or diverting attention away from yourself, there’s no tactics, and no-one really wins. It purports to be working out whodunnit but, given the way that the information is presented (by amateurs, probably half-cut, ad-hoc across a dinner table) the fun bit, the reason why you’re doing it, it to dress up fancy and pretend to be someone else for an evening. The crime scene angle is something of a magic circle to give folk a reason to take part outside of pure roleplay fantasy, because all play must at least have the essence of competition on it to be considered valid. Often the killer doesn’t know they dunnit until the very end of the game, and they’re as trying to solve the puzzle as much as anyone else is.

I dunno. If Werewolf is poker, Murder Mystery Parties are like getting together to do a jigsaw whilst pretending to be the people in the jigsaw.

BUT. The other fun thing about Murder Mysteries, which every other game I’ve mentioned here lacks, is the ability to rummage through each other’s dirty laundry. It’s a gossip thing. A “oh my GOD can you BELIEVE what he said?” thing. Everyone starts off the evening broadly neutral and, by the end of it, you want everyone implicated in a dozen scandals. The hidden role is the secrets you tried to hide that will inevitably come out over the course of the evening - you get a little dramatic arc. 

Maybe Murder Mysteries aren’t really hidden role games. Maybe they’re LARPs for 90’s normies. Maybe I’m just realising that two and a half thousand words into the commentary. Still: despite my apparent distaste for them, and despite my lack of experience with murder mysteries, I have written a hidden role murder mystery game.

LIKE WEREWOLF BUT NOT REALLY LIKE WEREWOLF AT ALL

Like a lot of my more recent work, ONE COURSE ULTIMATE MURDER MYSTERY DINNER PARTY is deconstructionalist to the point of breaking the thing I’m deconstructing. I wanted to fuck about with the idea that a hidden role game has winners and losers, and maybe we could just be sneaky and duplicitious for no particular reward.

I faffed about with the format for a while. Originally it was much more evidence-based, with players rolling on tables to randomly generate Things They Had Seen and then presenting these to one another in the form of accusations. I wanted to see if I could, by a sort of scattershot weight of fire and active justification from the players, reverse-engineer a murder mystery by leaving a bunch of clues around and seeing how they all went together. I had a concept around doing something by voting with cutlery, or “spending” cutlery to make things true.

Reader: it did not work. It will not surprise you to hear that you cannot make a satisfying murder plot out of loose offcuts live during play, although I did manage to put in some fun gags about the third-floor Poison Room and the Chandelier Manifold. 

Instead, after chatting with Maz for a bit, I worked out what I was missing: hidden roles. (Duh.) A Murder Mystery has the Detective, which is an open role, and the Killer, which is a hidden role, but there’s others who can play - entirely separately from the characters, which can be anything you want. So I put in an Accomplice, who helped the Killer, and a Rube who was tricked, and a Red Herring who appears guilty as sin throughout but actually didn’t do it. Put enough of these together, give them some prompts, and - I hope - a fun improvised story shakes out. Your role is hidden not because you’re trying to avoid it coming out, but because it mirrors the audience’s interaction with the narrative that shifts from mystery to understanding - you reveal it, a bit at a time. 

The characters are a collection of stereotypes that I thought it might be fun to be coupled with a tangentially-related motive for them to play around with and implicate them in the crime; I’ve got a big time oil man that lets you do your Foghorn Leghorn impression, a plucky photojournalist so you can say “Crackers! Whadda scoop!”, an obviously murderous widow, and so on. These are interchangeable and I bet you could just improvise a character from nothing if you’re feeling inspired. 

In the same way as Dungeon World simulates a game of D&D whilst not using the mechanics - it appears to be a game of D&D to the outside observer - this game attempts to simulate a Murder Mystery. You don’t know whodunnit but you’re encouraged to appear as though you have, because that’s fun, right? So it requires some responsibility on the players’ part to lean into it and play to genre. 

And if it doesn’t work:

A) It only took half an hour, and 

B) At least you got dinner out of it.

Have fun.

With love and fury,

• Grant "Whodunnit" Whowitt