This year, my spouse and I spent Christmas at my parent’s house. A few weeks before we left, I got an email from my Dad, telling us that we needed to bring costumes with us, because we were going to have a Boxing Day Murder Mystery Dinner!
This particular murder mystery was set in a casino, so we needed to bring some stylish clothes. My spouse’s character was a high roller, flaunting his money. My character was his fiancé, thrilled to be marrying the love of my life, who happened to also have quite a few dollars to his name. (If only! …kidding.)
My costume called for a little black dress, a tall order in the middle of winter, might I add. My little black dress was worn with a 3/4 length shrug and, in the end, some *gorgeous* wool socks. The socks matched to a T, let me tell you.
On Boxing Day, seven of us sat down to dinner (my uncle had to leave early), all decked out in our duds. For some reason, half of the characters were supposed to wear sunglasses, which was a bit ridiculous given that we were all inside. Can someone who has been to Vegas tell me if that’s normal? I know that it is for poker, but I didn’t think that was the case for most things.
The table was decorated with some bonus decks of cards and poker chips, too. We each received our character info, read it, listened to a short CD, and proceeded to the first scene.
It turns out that one of the trickiest parts of having a murder mystery party that really comes together is getting all of the participants to attempt to act. The character details and Q&As are all written down in little books, so most people just read out the book, verbatim, and very much disassociate from their characters. Oh well!
The amount of tangled web the plot managed to weave in about two hours of our time was impressive. By the end, every single character had a solid motivation to have been “the murderer.” Thankfully, no one was actually murdered, which wasn’t the case at this hotel that hosts murder mystery parties.
After the evening wrapped up, we were all in a bit of a casino state of mind, so we played some card games.
All in all, it was a pretty fun way to spend a night. If you are looking for some tips on how to host a murder mystery, check out this video on YouTube.
Casino games and murder mysteries were far from the only games that were played over Christmas. There was the puzzle-that-would-not-be-solved, plus a few too many games of Monopoly (but I won one!).c
Anne, I love how you were able to throw a boxing day murder mystery party based around a casino night. My wife and I are wanting to throw a fun dinner party as a housewarming party for our friends and family. Since we don’t have a lot of experience or time to plan it, we’ll want to look into hiring a professional with experience in this sort of thing.
So… Whodunnit?
It’s a secret, shhhh!
so fun!