Print a Murder Mystery Kit in Black and White

Every page of the PDF prints in black and white, and nothing in the game depends on color: the sheets, the clues and the ballots all read the same in grayscale. A host with a monochrome laser printer and a ream of plain paper can print the whole kit, at any tier, and run the evening exactly as a host with a color inkjet would. The reason is how the kits are built. The game lives in text: who each character is, what they want, what they hide, what to reveal round by round, and the clues that contradict what people say. Color is decoration on some of the evidence pages, and decoration is nice to have, not necessary. Grayscale printing also has two practical advantages. It is faster, and it is cheaper, which matters at twelve players where the stack is thick. So the question is not whether black and white works. It does. The question is which few pages you might still want in color, and the rest of this article answers it page type by page type, then covers the printer settings and the paper that make a grayscale kit look its best.

The character sheets are text: who you are, what you want, what you hide, what to reveal in each round. Printed in grayscale they are identical to the color version in every way that matters, and a guest reading one at the table cannot tell the difference. The same goes for the host guide: the introduction to read aloud, the run of the rounds, the section on adapting the game to your number of players, and the solution. The secret ballots are simple forms with a space for a name and a reason, handed out at the end for a minute of writing. Together these make up most of the pages, at every tier. That is where the savings are. If you have a monochrome printer, print all of this at home without a second thought. If you have a color printer, still print all of this in grayscale, because the color cartridge costs more and does nothing here. One detail worth keeping: normal quality for the host guide is a good idea, because you will read from it under dinner lighting while twelve people wait. Draft mode works for the sheets and the ballots, and the section on printer settings below says where it does not.

The evidence is where color earns its keep. Some clues are letters and notes, which print as well in grayscale as a character sheet. Others are made to look like objects: a photograph, a newspaper clipping, a document printed in color. In black and white these lose some of their punch. A photograph flattens, a colored heading turns gray. What they do not lose is legibility. Every word on every clue is readable in grayscale, and the game does not depend on a guest noticing that a heading was red. The article on fake documents in printable mystery kits explains why these pages look the way they do and how they are used at the table. For the purpose of printing, the rule is this: scroll through the PDF once, note the page numbers of the clues that carry a photograph or a colored document, and treat those as the color candidates. There are usually only a few. Everything else on the evidence pages, the letters, the notes, the plain documents, stays in grayscale with no loss at all. If you are unsure about a page, print it in grayscale and look at it: if you can read it, it works.

Once you have the page numbers, the plan writes itself. Print the whole kit at home in grayscale: sheets, host guide, ballots, and every clue. Then take only the color candidates to a print shop and have them printed in color on slightly heavier paper. That is a job of three or four pages, it costs very little, and it takes five minutes at the counter. The guide to printing a murder mystery kit at a print shop covers how to hand over a page list and how to keep the solution out of the shop's stack. If a shop is not convenient, the second-best option is a friend's color printer for those same pages, and the third is to print them at home in grayscale like everything else. The evening does not change. Guests will pass a gray photograph around exactly as they would a color one, and draw the same conclusions from it. What you should not do is print the entire kit in color to be safe. At twelve players that is a thick stack of text pages through the color cartridge for no gain. Color belongs on the handful of pages that were designed for it.

Most printers offer a toner-saving or ink-saving mode, and a draft quality setting. Both use less ink by printing lighter or with fewer dots. For the character sheets and the ballots, they are fine: the text is still readable, and these pages are read by one person at a time. For the evidence pages, they are not. A photograph printed in draft mode turns into a gray fog, and a document with small type loses its fine lines. Print the clues at normal quality, even in grayscale. The practical way to do this is two print jobs. First, the text pages in draft or toner-saving mode. Second, the clue pages at normal quality. In the print dialog, enter the page ranges rather than printing the whole file twice. If your printer only has one setting, choose normal quality for everything; the ink saved by draft mode is not worth a clue that nobody can read. One more setting to check: some dialogs offer both grayscale and black only. Grayscale keeps the shades of a photograph; black only turns everything to pure black and white, which is fine for text and bad for photographs. If you see both, use grayscale for the evidence and either one for the rest.

Plain copier paper is right for the character sheets, the host guide and the ballots. It folds into an envelope, it takes ink well in grayscale, and nobody will look at it twice. For the clues, a slightly heavier paper helps: the pages are passed around for two hours, and heavier stock does not curl or tear. Buy a small pack rather than a ream. Off-white or cream paper gives a photograph or a newspaper clipping a little of the age that color would have given it, at no extra cost, and is a good trick for a grayscale print. Laminating is unnecessary. A kit is played once per group, since everyone who played knows the solution, so the clues do not need to survive years of handling. Laminated pages also shine under dinner lighting and are harder to read at an angle. If you want the evidence to feel special, heavier paper and a plain envelope do more than plastic. The same rules apply to a detective case file, the cooperative format for 2 to 6 players on the detective case files page: the group reads the documents together around one table, so print the text in grayscale and only the visual pages in color, if at all.

Black and white is the answer to a color question, not to a printer question. If there is no printer in the house, the options are ranked in No Printer? Run a Printable Murder Mystery Anyway: a print shop first, a friend's or an office printer second, a library or a coworking space third, and screens last. In every one of those cases, grayscale is still the right choice for the text pages, and the handful of color candidates can be printed in color wherever a color machine is available. Whatever route you take, the kit is the same file: pay by card through Stripe, receive the PDF by email within seconds, print it for any group from 6 to 12 players, and run the night from the host guide. Nothing is shipped and nothing needs to be. The format is laid out in full on the printable murder mystery kit page.