What the Host Reads Before the Party

Not in the PDF. The host's guide and the reveal sit on the case file portal, opened with the personal code that arrives by email after payment, in the format BW followed by seven unambiguous characters. That is deliberate: it means every page you print can be read by anyone at the table, with nothing to keep face down and no way for a guest to leaf into the answer. The four files are on the murder mystery kits page.

Who to cast, in what order, and which six core characters are always dealt. How many to print and what to leave out. How to lay out the exhibit folders and what to have on the table. This is the part to read with a pen. Note the casting you have chosen against the guest list, because at eight in the evening with people arriving you will not want to reconstruct it from memory.

The release schedule, minute by minute: which exhibits open when, and what each one brings to the case. In Murder at the Royal Casino that is minutes 20, 40, 60, 75, 90, 110, 120 and 130. It also covers what to say for characters nobody is playing. The rule is narrow and worth memorising: you confirm what their social document already says and nothing more. A host who improvises a clue breaks the case for everybody.

When to close the negotiations, how to judge whether a declaration is compliant, how signed agreements are counted, and how to score the ballots out of twenty against a written grid. The scoring is more forgiving than hosts expect: equivalent wording is accepted, exhibit titles count instead of codes, and the criteria are independent, so a wrong conclusion does not cancel correct reasoning. Read that page twice; it is the one you will use under time pressure.

The last part is the solution for the host. Read it, and then close it: it is for rulings, not for the table. The text you read aloud at the end is the reveal, which appears only after you enter the killer's name on the portal once the ballots are in. Never read aloud the solution page, the release schedule or a private sheet. And three wrong attempts at the killer's name open a safety exit, so a host who blanks at eleven at night is never locked out of their own party. Several spellings are accepted as well: a first name alone, a surname alone, the full name, a title with the surname, or the character code from the file. The whole run of an evening is described on the printable murder mystery kit page.