These sorts of games were a bit of a fad back in the ‘eighties. The idea was this – you’d invite over a bunch of friends, ply them with booze and food, and then have them roleplay characters in an elaborately plotted murder mystery - characters whose job it was to find out as much about one another as possible in the hopes of discovering who committed the dastardly act. Standard packaged versions of these sorts of games usually included some sort of audiovisual ‘feelie’ – a cassette or VCR tape – to provide basic info about the corpse and the other guests and to ‘set the mood’ with sonorous speech and a few cheesy sound effects. You’d also occasionally be given recipes for food that would feature in the plot of each story, and pseudo-fancy embossed invitations with which to solicit folks to attend your little bash. The HOW TO HOST A MURDER and MURDER A LA CARTE games were especially successful product lines.
The games usually worked in something like the following way – at the outset everyone would be handed a booklet with information about their characters. The ‘murderer’ would learn from reading this that he or she had done the awful deed, and provided instructions about the precise extent to which he or she was permitted to lie or circumvent difficult questions from the other players. The game would be three or four turns long – at the beginning of each turn, players would turn a page in their booklets and discover new information about their characters that they could usually choose whether or not to share with others.
Sounds silly, right? Certainly, the turn-based nature of the games caused them to lack a certain verisimilitude, and the commercially distributed games were usually full of lame puns and plot twists that would have made Agatha Christie go pale with embarrassment. A few years back, though, my girlfriend (now wife) and I found a gently used copy of one of these things in a consignment shop for $1 and decided to try it out. We invited over a half-dozed normally rather staid and serious graduate students – a bunch of homebody types who rarely socialized with one another, and who regarded any sort of diversion that involved elements of role-playing with the same sort of suspicion that they usually were inclined to reserve for guys with hockey-player haircuts named Earl. Within about forty-five minutes of arriving at our apartment, they were all stinking drunk, laughing foolishly, and shouting abuse at one another as they strove to discover the true identity of the killer (who turned out to be a rather quiet, pregnant Descartes scholar named Debbie who let slip the crucial info about her character after having downed about 2/3 of a bottle of expensive Shiraz).
