Last night my friends Julie and Heather held a murder mystery party to both celebrate Julie’s birthday as well as have a goodbye party of sorts before she moves across the country to Seattle (boo!!!!). As usual with their parties they go all out with food and decorations. They of course accumulate lots of friends who are game as well, so most everyone was dressed up in character to some degree.

The mystery was set in the town of Deadwood in some year in the 1800s that I forget. It was the end of a big poker tournament and we were all awaiting the award money to be given to the winner Mitch Maverick when he winds up dead. I had never done one of these play at home murder mysteries before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. We all got a little information about our characters prior to the party so we would know how to dress and know a little bit of background information about who we were. When we arrived we got additional information and instructions about what other characters we should be talking to and about what. The murder happened after this first act, and then we all got additional information that we were supposed to use to try and help figure out who the murderer was. You were also supposed to try and wind up with the most money at the end, so you could use your information for bribery or getting paid for telling others what you had.

My husband was actually the character who got murdered, which was probably fine with him because he’s not much into these kinds of things. He did however continue to try and win the money part of the game even after he was dead. He tried to convince people to give him money to tell them who killed him even though he didn’t actually know. A few people fell for it, but he still didn’t win. Some people were really into it talking to everyone and trying to all kinds of money. I pretty much just followed the instructions on my sheet, and didn’t really talk to any of the characters that didn’t interact with my part of the storyline. Pretty much everyone did stay in completely in character for the entire game though, which was pretty impressive. At the end of everything no one actually wound up figuring out who did it, so we obviously aren’t very good detectives. It was fun though.

I’m definitely going to miss Julie when she leaves Baltimore in a few weeks.