Office Murder Mystery Game for Any Time of Year

A room with a large table, chairs, decent light, and pencils, erasers and scrap paper. That is the list. No projector, no facilitator, no costumes, no catering dependency. What you print is the file itself: seventeen pages for The Enigma Code, nineteen for The Winter of '74, twenty-four for The Heist of the Century, thirty-seven for Operation Blackout. A4 single-sided at 100 percent, or on US Letter tick fit to page. Everything spreads out on the table and nothing is sealed.

Use the cooperative format: a case file with no roles, no host and nobody hiding anything. Everyone is on the same side against the documents. That removes both awkward things about mystery games at work in one move, because nobody has to perform a character and nobody has to lie to a colleague. One to seven investigators per file, $39, one and a half to four hours depending on the title. The catalogue with times and exhibit counts is on the detective case files page.

For a two-hour slot take The Enigma Code, about two hours, or The Heist of the Century, one and a half to two hours and the only mid-level case in the catalogue. For a longer offsite afternoon, Operation Blackout runs two to three hours with sixteen hints in four tracks, so a stuck table can move without anyone revealing the answer. Start on time and say at the beginning that the first ten minutes are silent reading. Groups that skip that spend the rest of the session catching each other up.

A case file plays up to seven investigators, so a team of eighteen runs three tables rather than one scrum. Buy one file, print a set of exhibits per table, start every table at the same minute. Do not announce a winner. Compare reasoning at the end instead: which document changed each table's mind, and what they believed for too long. A ranking turns careful reading into speed-reading and rewards whoever shouts first, which is the opposite of what you booked the room for.

The version with characters, secrets and a culprit among the players is a genuinely good evening, and it belongs at an offsite dinner or an end-of-year party rather than a working afternoon. It runs six to twelve players plus a host who does not play, about three hours, $39.90 a file. Two cautions if you use it at work. Cast it yourself rather than drawing lots in public, so nobody is handed a role that embarrasses them. And keep it optional: an employee who does not want to play a character should be able to sit out without explaining why. The four files are on the murder mystery kits page.