Printable Awards for a Murder Mystery Night

Five is the right number for a table of eight to twelve: enough that a third of the room goes home with something, not so many that they lose meaning. Best Detective: the guest whose ballot named the culprit with the right motive. Decided by the ballots, not by applause. Best Liar: the guest who kept a secret the longest, usually the culprit, sometimes a suspect whose secret never came out. Best Costume: the only category the room votes on by noise. Most Wrongly Accused: the innocent guest who collected the most ballots. There is always one. Best Dramatic Death: only if the story allows. The crime has usually already happened when the evening opens, so this one is often replaced by Best Performance, for the guest who never once dropped character. Add a sixth only if you have a specific guest in mind for it, such as Best Question for the line that cracked the case. Categories invented on the spot to make sure everyone gets one read as consolation prizes, and adults notice. Better four honest awards than twelve polite ones.

The kit's secret ballots are handed out after the third round. Each guest writes a suspect and the reasons, folds the ballot and hands it in, and the host reads them before the solution. That stack is the jury for the main award. Sort it into three piles as you read: the right culprit with the right motive, the right culprit with the wrong reasons, and everyone else. Best Detective comes from the first pile. If it holds more than one ballot, the earliest handed in wins, or the one with the fullest reasoning; announce which rule you used, and nobody argues with paper. The same stack gives you Most Wrongly Accused for free: count the names, and the innocent character with the most votes is your winner. It also settles Best Liar in most cases, because the guest nobody voted for despite being the culprit has earned it. How the ballots are collected and read is set out in How the Accusation Ballot Works in a Printable Kit. If your guests kept a detective notebook during the rounds, the grids make the reasons easy to compare; the notebook is not in the kit either, and A Printable Detective Notebook for Your Guests shows how to draw one.

A certificate needs five lines and no design. Open a blank page, landscape, center everything, and type: Murder Mystery Night, the scenario's title, the date. This certifies that, then a blank line for the name. is hereby named, then the award in large letters. for, then one line on why: for naming the culprit and the motive; for keeping a secret through three rounds; for a hat the whole table talked about. Signed, the host, with a line to sign on the night. Print one per category on card stock if you have it, plain paper if not, and sign them with a pen in front of the room. Leave the name blank until the reveal, because until the ballots are read you do not know who wins, and a certificate printed in advance with the wrong name is worse than none. The theme is carried by the font and one word: for Hollywood Noir, call the awards the ceremony and the certificate a nomination; for Murder at the Royal Casino, print a chip on it; for The Cursed Manor, a serif face on cream paper looks like a will. The seven murder mystery kits each suggest their own vocabulary without effort.

The reveal is the peak of the evening, and the awards belong in the thirty seconds after it, not at the door as people leave. The host reads the solution, the culprit explains how it was done, the room reacts, and in that noise the host says "and the Best Detective is" and reads the name from the ballot. The energy carries the ceremony; done twenty minutes later, over coats, it falls flat. The sequence that gets you there, closing the investigation, hearing the accusations aloud, then reading the solution, is in How to Run the Final Reveal So It Lands, and the awards are its last beat. Keep it to five minutes. One sentence per award, the certificate signed and handed over, a photo if someone wants one, next. Announce Best Detective first, because it settles the question everyone is still arguing about, then Most Wrongly Accused, because the laugh restores whoever lost the argument. End with Best Liar or Best Costume, whichever has the better story. The culprit, if they win nothing else, gets a handshake and the last word; the kit's solution has already made them the center of the room.

A prize is a token, and the token is funnier when it is small. A plastic magnifying glass for Best Detective. A bar of chocolate with a hand-written label for Best Liar. A paper crown for Best Costume. A pair of toy handcuffs for Most Wrongly Accused, to be worn for the rest of the night. A single flower for the dramatic death. Spend the equivalent of a coffee per prize and no more; a real gift changes the tone from joke to competition, and the game was never a competition. What to skip: trophies, anything engraved, and anything that has to be ordered and delivered in time. The kit itself is delivered as a PDF within seconds of payment and nothing is shipped, which is the rhythm the whole evening should keep. The awards go on the same list as the printing and the envelopes, two days before the party, in Printable Murder Mystery Party Checklist: print five certificates, buy five small prizes, leave the names blank.

None of this is in the PDF, and it is worth being clear about what is. A kit contains the host guide, with the introduction to read aloud, the run of the rounds and the section on adapting the game to your number of players; one character sheet per player; the clues to hand out, organized by round; the secret ballots; and the solution, for the host only. Invitations, name tags, place cards, awards and decorations are not included, and the articles in this series show how to make each at home. The ballots are the part of that list that matters for awards, because they turn the main prize from an opinion into a count. A host who has never run a murder mystery party can name Best Detective with certainty on the first try, and that is the award people remember. Everything else is a printed page and a bar of chocolate. For what the file contains tier by tier, from 6 to 12 players, and the license that lets you reprint it for the next party, start with the printable murder mystery kit page.