Printing a Murder Mystery Kit at a Print Shop

A home printer handles most kits. Four situations tip the balance toward a shop. Color evidence pages: a photograph or a colored document loses some punch in grayscale, and a home inkjet on plain paper does not do it justice, while a shop's color machine does. Twelve players' worth of sheets: at the top tier, the character sheets, the clues for three rounds, the ballots and the host guide add up to a thick stack, and a shop prints it in minutes. No printer at home: a shop is faster than borrowing one. A last-minute evening: the PDF arrives by email within seconds of payment, so the only delay between buying and playing is printing, and a shop removes it. The opposite cases are just as clear. A tier of 6 to 8 players in black and white is a fifteen-minute job at home and costs less than the trip. The guide to printing your murder mystery kit covers that home route; this one is about the counter. One rule applies to both: the file prints in color or in black and white on any printer, and it is laid out on A4, which matters at a US shop and is covered further down.

Two ways, and never a third. Copy the PDF to a USB stick, or use the shop's own upload form if it has one. Both keep the file between you and the shop. The third way, which people reach for out of habit, is to email the PDF to a group of friends and let whoever is near a shop print it. Do not. The file contains the solution, and the moment it sits in a group thread the game is over for anyone who scrolls to the wrong pages. Before you leave the house, open the PDF once and note the total page count, then note where the solution pages are; they are for the host only, and you will want them printed and pulled out of the stack. If you plan to print only certain pages in color, write down their page numbers now. A shop works from a page list, not from a description like the page with the newspaper. If you use the upload form, check the paper size the form offers. Most US shops default to Letter. That is fine, as long as the scaling setting is right, and the sections below deal with both.

Single-sided for the character sheets Heavier paper for the clues, plain paper for everything else No stapling across characters: one character, one sheet or one small set Color only for the pages that need it, black and white for the rest One copy of everything: one purchase covers your whole group Fit to printable area on Letter paper Single-sided sheets are easier to fold into an envelope and easier to read at a dinner table, where nobody wants to flip a page while being questioned. Heavier paper for the clues is a small cost that makes evidence feel like evidence when it is passed around, and it survives twelve pairs of hands. Stapling is the mistake to name out loud: a shop that staples the whole job binds the culprit's sheet to the witness's, and you spend the evening pulling staples. Ask for the stack loose, or stapled per character only if a sheet runs to two pages. Color for a few pages and grayscale for the rest is explained in printing a murder mystery kit in black and white, with a list of what actually gains from color.

The solution pages are for the host only. At home this is easy: they come out of the printer and go into a sealed envelope. At a shop the risk is different. The job is collated by a stranger, handed over in a single stack, and often looked at by a helpful assistant checking that the print came out well. None of that is a problem in itself. The problem is what happens next, when you hand the stack to a friend to carry, or sort the envelopes at the kitchen table with a guest already in the room. So take the solution pages yourself, at the counter, before anything else. Fold them, put them in your bag, and sort the rest later. If you would rather the shop never printed them at all, give a page range that stops before them and print those pages at home or at a friend's; they need no color. The same goes for the host guide as a whole, which reveals the run of the game: keep it in your own hands. A character sheet is different. Only its own player should read it, but a shop assistant who glances at one sheet learns nothing that spoils the game.

Shops set their own prices and they change, so no figure here would survive a year. The logic does. A black and white page costs a few cents; a color page costs several times more; heavier paper adds a little per sheet. A full kit for eight players in black and white with a handful of color pages therefore lands at a few dollars, and even a twelve-player job with heavier paper for every clue stays far below the price of a boxed game. The kit itself is $39 for 6 to 8 players, $49 for 9 to 10 and $59 for 11 to 12, and one purchase covers the whole group, so the printing bill is the only variable. Two ways to keep it down. Ask for color only on the pages you listed, not on the whole job; a shop that runs everything through the color machine charges color rates for plain text. And print the character sheets and the host guide at home in grayscale if you have any printer at all, taking only the evidence pages to the shop. What you get for the money is speed and finish: the stack comes out flat, dry and sorted, which is more than most home printers manage on a Friday evening.

The PDF is laid out on A4, the paper size used almost everywhere outside the United States and Canada. US Letter is slightly shorter and wider. Printed at 100 percent on Letter, the bottom of an A4 page can be clipped. Printed with fit to page, also called scale to fit or fit to printable area depending on the machine, the page shrinks by about six percent and nothing is cut. Text stays perfectly readable. So at the counter, say it in one sentence: this is an A4 file, please fit it to the printable area on Letter. Shops know exactly what to do with that. If you upload the job instead, look for the scaling option in the form and pick fit rather than actual size. If the form offers A4 paper, that works too, and the envelopes you buy will then need to be C5 or C4 rather than 6 by 9 or 9 by 12 inches. The measurements and the envelope logic are in Murder Mystery PDF: US Letter or A4?. Check before you leave the shop: pick one character sheet and one clue from the stack and look at the bottom margin. If the last line is there, the whole job is right.

If the party is tonight, the order of operations matters. Buy the kit first, at the right tier, and download the PDF from the email; that takes two minutes and nothing is shipped. Copy it to a USB stick or upload it to the shop. Print the whole thing in black and white, plus your short list of color pages, single-sided, unstapled. Take the solution pages out of the stack at the counter. Sort the envelopes at home while guests are still an hour away. A shop prints a full kit in minutes, but counters have queues, so call ahead if the party starts in less than three hours. Bring the page numbers written down, because the person at the counter will ask. And bring envelopes: they are not in the kit and the shop may not sell them. Once the stack is home, the rest of the evening runs exactly as it would with a home print. The seven kits, their tiers and their run times are on the murder mystery kits page, and the format as a whole is explained on the printable murder mystery kit page.