Murder Mystery Dinner

Murder Mystery Dinner:

Let me start by saying that the traditional murder mystery dinner is something that I tend to have a lot of hang-ups about. On paper, the concept behind most murder mystery dinner parties sounds solid. You get together with friends and enjoy a meal and a little bit of intrigue with your food. I feel that the execution is always lacking. This might be entirely my beef within my own experience, but I’d like to pose the potential that this is more an issue with people having never actually played a good murder mystery game. All the murder mystery dinners I’ve partaken in have been painfully rote, exasperatingly bland, and easily repeatable with no differentiation in the outcome. Aside from the fact that no one should be having in-person murder mystery dinners anyway, for the time being, I’d like to propose the argument that no one should really be having murder mystery dinners ever. Honestly, there’s a better way. Maybe I spent too many dinners with my parents gathered around the TV watching Star Trek, but I can’t help but feel that the murder mystery dinner concept is inherently flawed. The basic rationale behind the dinner table setting to me seems like a forced and stinted way to coerce people to converse and interact. To be brutally honest, I think most of us are beyond this point. If you’ve found your way to this article, I’m going to take a leap of faith and assume that you and your group of friends are entirely capable of getting together for a game night without having a structured dinner involved. If you’re ready for a game without limits, you’ve found the right place here at Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries.

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Murder Mystery Dinner Party Kits:

Perhaps the quintessential example of what frustrates me so much about this situation manifests in the form of murder mystery dinner party kits. I won’t deny for a second the plots and conceptual writing that goes into these games is not intriguing but often very well thought out. The crux of every one I’ve played through is that they are entirely lacking in any potential for player creativity. The murder mystery dinner party kits I’ve experienced in the past are some of the blandest and driest experiences humanly possible. I would equate them to a first stage reading of a mediocre amateur-written play where all the participants haven’t had dinner yet. You have your hypoglycemic friend at the far side of the table who’s starving but being forced to read two pages of monologue describing generic exposition. Your other friend next to you has already had too much to drink on an empty stomach and simply won’t shut up. Everyone else is sitting there with bated breath waiting to open the next envelope to see when they can eat and what kind of scripted monologue they need to read to “solve” the “mystery” taking place. Most murder mystery dinner party kits are nothing more than a glorified choose-your-own-adventure that tells you when you’re allowed to eat. I don’t like being told when I’m allowed to eat.

Likewise, I don’t like being told what to read. While I’m fine having a character pre-made for me, I don’t want to have that character’s interactions for the night entirely scripted. The only way you’re ever going to get me on board with a murder mystery dinner party kit again is if the party kit’s free and they’re providing the dinner. Impossible conditions to meet, I know. I won’t name names, but maybe all those murder mystery dinner party kits should have been better. Instead of being incredibly flat and boring events focused on hand-holding, pre-written stories, and pre-recorded videos, they should have focused more on gameplay, characterization, and individual creativity. Besides showcasing overtly tedious styles of gameplay that should be resigned to children’s board games, the lack of personal interpretation and absence of customization makes these games insufferable to me. They don’t allow you to expand your character or yourself in the way a true role-playing game should. While I’m certainly not the authority on all murder mystery dinner party kits, the ones I have experienced have been astonishingly droll and have left me wanting. There is no hand-holding here at Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries. We make fluid and original games that require the player and the host to use their creativity to craft a unique experience.

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Murder Mystery Dinner Party Box:

Now that I’ve shit all over a bunch of people’s hard work, I’d like to talk about a more positive note and a different style of game. I have no idea why this simple change in semantics makes for such a different style of gameplay, but I’ve had exponentially better experiences with games titled as murder mystery dinner party boxes. The concept behind a “party box” and a “kit” seems to be inherently different, but certainly not mutually exclusive. The murder mystery dinner party boxes I’ve played in the past have not been role-playing games but have been more board game style. None of them have even had dinner involved and the referenced “dinner” is more of a metaphorical concept for the game itself. I do love a good board game, and while I’ve become somewhat obsessed with open-style role-playing games, that doesn’t mean that this style doesn’t have its place. At Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries, we don’t have any games this static, but I’m not going to knock on board games for being board games. I’m here to dis role-playing games that don’t let you truly play a role.

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Murder Mystery Dinner App:

This is a new style that entirely baffles me. Maybe I’m just not hip to the social media crap that coaxes me into having my face perpetually glued to a phone. Murder mystery dinner apps take the same basis as a murder mystery dinner party kit and use a phone-based application to achieve the same thing. I guess it’s an eco-friendly way to have a boring evening since this excludes the distribution of a bunch of scripts and envelopes. My mind reels at the conceptualization of gathering your friends together to sit around a dinner table simply to pull your phones out and stare at them for the rest of the evening. That just sounds like every other dinner with friends I had before COVID. I have not personally played a murder mystery dinner app but from the initial context and what I’ve seen off the bat from companies offering this style of game, I don’t think I’ll be trying it out anytime in the future. If, however, they are something entirely different than what I’ve read about, feel free to enlighten me.

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Best Murder Mystery Dinner Game:

If you were to ask me “what’s the best murder mystery dinner game?”, I’d simply say take the “dinner” out of the mix. Having hosted dozens of murder mystery parties pre-corona virus from a slew of different companies and now having hosted dozens of online murder mysteries since then, I can tell you that the best way to host any murder mystery dinner is sans dinner. Come into your game with full bellies and bring your best snacks and finest alcoholic beverages to the event. When you don’t have a giant script in your hands that you’re trying to read through and an obligatory dinner you have to “enjoy”, you have the liberty to move around and really create your own character and craft your own experience. No more stinted evenings sitting awkwardly next to the person that you’re trying to murder. The best murder mystery dinner games are all game and no dinner. A unique role-playing style and intuitive contextual design make Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries an entirely different creature than any of murder mystery dinner party kits or apps that are going around. I will be the first to applaud all the effort and work that has gone into creating games like that in the past. The writing alone has, no doubt, taken hours to plan out but I can’t help but be disappointed in this style of gameplay. They simply don’t allow for the creativity that I’ve become accustomed to from other murder mystery games out there. Perhaps you think it’s too daunting to play a non-scripted character? Let me assure you, it is not. I have played many Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries with people who have absolutely no experience playing anything like these games. There is no acting skill needed and no previous experience with role-playing games required. All that is required is the ability to have fun pretending and the good-spirited ability to laugh at oneself and others. I’ll also be the first to add in, nothing is stopping you from eating dinner while you play a Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries game. I just feel from experience that this curtails the progress of the game and potentially derails timing and character development for your players. Besides that, the themes focused on in most Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries games don’t center around the bland situations that are conducive to murder mystery dinner parties. Communicating from apocalypse bunkers or trying to solve the conundrum of the world’s next great pandemic just doesn’t feel right with the setting of a ham dinner. Even our in-person games like Wrestling Murder Mystery just don’t seem the right fit for a 4-course meal. Who has time for dinner during Human Beatdown? This brings me to the last point.

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Murder Mystery Dinner Party Themes:

I’ve seen countless companies in the past try to add flavor to their murder mystery dinner party themes to no success. I can’t blame them for failing. The very concept alone of a murder mystery dinner party is extremely limiting. It pretty much relegates you to aristocracy, espionage, and the millionth cruise ship murder mystery. I’m so f-ing sick of murder mysteries on cruise ships! While these themes have their place, at Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries, we were getting extremely bored of playing the same game again, and again, and again… And again… There is simply no reason to pigeon toe oneself into regurgitating the same content for the umpteenth time. If you’ve been looking for a murder mystery dinner party that exceeds expectations and doesn’t limit you and your friends to reading off notecards around the fine china, check out the options from Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries. Not only are our games contextually unique, but they offer you and your players a chance to make the game your own. With the number of potential goals, abilities, and secrets written into every character, the chances of having the same outcome from a playthrough is all but impossible with our games. Especially now, with so many of us forced into our homes instead of visiting our friends, there has never been a better time to start experimenting with some of Dastardly Deeds Murder Mysteries online games. Our online games accommodate small intimate parties from five to large 12-player-plus games that will have you second-guessing everyone’s motives. We’ve had an amazing experience over the last few months of bringing together people who have never met through an online medium. Together with friends new and old we’ve created stories and scenarios that will not soon be forgotten (this was sometimes dependent on how much we drank that night). If you’re brave enough to take on a new style of adventure, prepare yourself to take the game away from the dinner party setting and start to craft your own unique experience for you and your crew.