Update: A murder mystery game in a castle in Ireland

Back in January I was tasked by my brother in law to create a murder mystery parlor game during our family reunion in an Irish castle. Well we just got back last night, and it ended up being one of the most fun vacations of my life.

This is a family of social over-achievers. Super engaged professionals and executives and teachers. A dozen of them would stay up every night drinking and laughing til 2am, sleep 5 hours, then do it all over again. I have trouble keeping up, so I'm glad the game I designed happened on one of the first nights. At first, the mastermind behind this whole trip only gave me 90 minutes for the middle of the day but he lost control of the schedule and I got my three hours in the dark as is proper for a game like this.

All 21 players absolutely committed, bringing vintage costumes and props across the Atlantic for this one night. I created a deck of character cards for each of them, as well as a number of other special prop and event cards, and as they were all getting dressed I texted them their roles.

This was the first hangup. The castle had very poor cell and wifi reception so the texts didn't go through. But all 22 of us had iPhones so I ended up AirDropping everyone's character and gave them personal, private notes. I wouldn't mention the tech glitch otherwise, but this absolutely changed my own strategy as the dead victim, Lord Reginald Springfield. I thought I would be in a kind of control room with my laptop receiving texts from the butler or others when they found certain props. But because they couldn't communicate like that, I had to shadow them through the rooms and sprint like the devil in anticipation of their next moves to certain parts of the castle and its grounds.

Having never done this, and certainly not at this scale, I was surprised by several of their own strategies. At the outset, the butler convened (most of) the group and announced the reading of the will. Then the cops showed up to tell everyone the will was missing, Lord Springfield was poisoned and dead in bed, and that they were all suspects. The Inspector and Constable then began interviewing the subjects one by one.

I'm aware that normal police procedure is to isolate suspects for interviews, specifically to compare notes and find the lies afterward. But I didn't think these two players were aware of that. Turned out I was wrong. Instead of interviewing everyone in front of each other, they squirreled each suspect away and gave them the business, taking copious notes that they shared with no one.

Taking their own cues from this, when the suspects began making their own conjectures and discovering clues, they shared them with absolutely no one unless forced. It was perfect game theory. I just didn't expect these competitive bastards to be so very competitive. It was fantastic. The chaos agents played their parts beautifully, muddying the waters, and the spiritualists spent all their time trying to find all seven of their number to convene a seance. Once they did, I raced into my room and put on a long white nightgown and drew a kind of kabuki corpse makeup on my face. They were racing around in the courtyard outside in the last of the sun and I tap...tap...tapped on the window until one of them saw me, an apparition in a castle window. Classic imagery. She pointed and screamed.

All seven spiritualists (except for the devilish Colonel, who only pretended to be one so he could eavesdrop on the seance) piled into the parlor and held hands. I started walking down the upstairs hall toward them moaning a very haunting melody line from an early Frank Zappa album over and over, then entered the parlor. They said their hair stood on end lol. I whispered my answers then disappeared and later, my widow Lady Eleanor found the burned note in the fireplace of that room.

Tremendous dramatic moment here: That's the note that revealed I wrote them all out of the will and left the entire estate to Madame DuBois. But Eleanor of all people found it and you could see her internal torment. Then she turned away from them all and didn't share it. For nearly another hour they labored to puzzle out the clues while she acted out very well the utter destruction of her life. Absolutely choice stuff.

The twist I had planned is that most of the clues pointed toward Vicar Atkinson and he himself only knew that he blacked out after an argument with the victim. So his card tells him that he is almost certainly guilty and if they accused him, to flee. The line of his card at the end is my personal favorite: But if they actually do accuse you, your only chance is to run. That Inspector is old and the Constable is a woman. How fast can she be? I don't think that Tyler (the vicar) knew that his west coast cousin Lena (Constable Wright) was a huge track star, 100 meters champion, crowned fastest girl in San Francisco two years in a row. I wanted to see her run his ass down like The Flash.

But alas, the real murderer, Hanne (Ingrid) is from Hamburg, Germany and although her card told her she had poisoned the victim while leaving no clues, and that all she had to do was keep a poker face and she was in the clear, she simply couldn't do it. Asking a proper German hausfrau to lie to the police, even in a FUCKING GAME, was too stressful for her and she broke down and confessed the entire thing. I'd hoped to finish this neat and tidy Agatha Christie affair with an accusation and arrest of the vicar, delighted by the idea that justice was NOT served and the wrong man was convicted. Very post-modern take on the whole thing. Two days later I shared all my notes as planned and that was when I'd expected them to realize they'd let the real killer slip away... But never count on duplicity from a Teutonic mind.

We took antique photos of everyone's insane costumes which I can't share for privacy. But they were perfect. It was an absolute smash hit, with people spending the rest of the week recounting the plots and sub-plots and attacking each other in character. The next night was a family trivia night. The following night was a filming of two musical scenes from Rocky Horror. The following night we rented a traditional Irish band and they gave us a concert in the 15th century hall. We took day trips to Dingle and Limerick and Cork and I hiked and biked and two days ago I was swimming in the Shannon River outside Killaloe.

An excellent trip all around. Thanks for reading. Happy to answer any and all questions and yeah now I guess I have a side hustle as a murder mystery game designer if anyone needs me.