The 50-Page Picture Dossier: What You Print

Page one is the cover. Page two is the notice: what the file contains, what to print, how many players, how long it runs, and where the host's guide lives. Pages three to twenty-six are the twelve characters, two pages each. Then the exhibits: twenty-four for The Cursed Manor and Murder at the Royal Casino, thirty for Crime Aboard the Orient Express and Hollywood Noir, which is why those two run to fifty-six pages. The exhibits are photographs of documents: a night report, a bar notebook, a cloakroom register, a clockmaker's note, statements, contracts, a newspaper page. Nothing is a wall of description. You read the paper, not a summary of it. The four kits are listed on the murder mystery kits page.

Because a document can be wrong in a way a narrator cannot. A register gives a time; another register gives the same moment from a clock that runs fast. A statement claims a room was never entered; a visitor log contradicts it without saying so. A player holding two papers can see the gap for themselves, which is the whole pleasure. It also means nobody has to act. Nothing in the evening depends on improvising a scene: you read, you compare, you argue. The character packs carry what each person knows, and the exhibits carry what can be proved.

Not the whole file. You print the notice for yourself, the two pages of each character you are dealing, and all the exhibits. At eight players that is the six core packs plus two supporting ones, so sixteen character pages instead of twenty-four, plus the exhibits. Print single-sided at 100 percent. The layout is A4; on US Letter tick fit to page and the sheet shrinks about six percent with nothing cut. Colour renders the papers better, and black and white stays perfectly legible: no deduction in any kit depends on a shade.

The host's guide and the reveal. They sit on the case file portal, opened by the personal code that comes with the order. That is what lets every printed page be read by anyone at the table: there is nothing to keep face down, and nobody can leaf their way to the answer. The guide holds the release schedule of the exhibits, what each one brings, how to adjudicate the signed agreements, and the solution. The reveal text appears only when the host enters the killer's name, after the ballots.

Preparation is longer than with a script and the game itself is shorter to explain. You spend an hour printing and sorting exhibits into folders by act, and then you barely explain rules: people understand a cloakroom register without a tutorial. It also makes the file reusable. The license lets you print it again for another private group, and since the exhibits are documents rather than a performance, a second table reads them exactly as the first did.