Murder Mystery Party in London

The kits and case files are composed for A4 at 100 percent, single-sided, which is what your printer at home or the shop on the corner already uses. No fit to page, no six percent shrink, no cropped margins on the photographed exhibits. That matters more than it sounds, because the exhibits are documents you read closely: a register, a timetable, a handwritten note. A scaled page makes small figures harder to compare, and comparing figures is the whole game. The four files are on the murder mystery kits page.

The documents use the clock you already read. Murder at the Royal Casino opens with the baron raising his flute at 22:45 and collapsing an hour later, and the case turns on two clocks that do not agree. Nobody at the table has to convert anything or wonder whether a time means morning or evening. The kit exhibits also release on a schedule given in minutes, from twenty to a hundred and thirty, so the host reads the clock on the wall rather than doing arithmetic while eleven people wait.

A kit needs seats for your players plus the host, and a corner where two people can negotiate quietly. In a one-reception-room flat, eight players plus a host is realistic; twelve is not, unless you have a table that seats thirteen. So at eight, take any of the four kits. If the room is genuinely tight, Crime Aboard the Orient Express suits it thematically and practically: it is a locked-room story on a train, its thirty exhibits are split into four binders, and a cramped setting is the point rather than a problem.

Print shops are everywhere and the job is simple to ask for: A4, single-sided, 100 percent, colour if it is cheap and black and white otherwise. No deduction in any file depends on a shade. A kit is fifty or fifty-six pages, of which you print the notice, two pages per character you deal and all the exhibits. Nothing arrives by post. Payment is by card, an email brings a personal code, and you download the file from the portal yourself, so a Thursday decision for a Saturday party is normal. The full routine is on the printable murder mystery kit page.

Prices are in US dollars: $39.90 for a kit, $39 for a case file, $49 for The Phantom Affair. Your card is charged in dollars, and nothing is shipped, so there is no customs question and no delivery window to plan around. The code waits indefinitely until you first use it, then stays valid one week from that first opening, not from the purchase. You can buy a month before the party and open it the day before. If you mislay the code, the portal sends it back to the email address on the order. If your group is under six, the detective case files are the format that fits instead.