Desk Notes | Murder Desk

Ayvalık: the olive-oil town behind Honest Weight

2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Honest Weight is set in November 2009 at Karataşlı Cove, a small bay a short drive north of Ayvalık on the Aegean coast of Türkiye. The cove, the mill and the family who run it are invented. The town is real, and it shaped the case.

This note is the background we read while writing it. Nothing here is a clue, and you need none of it to solve the case. If you have already played, it may simply make the place feel more solid.

Where it is

Ayvalık is a town and district of Balıkesir Province, on the north-west Aegean coast. Across its bay lies a scatter of small islands, and beyond them, on a clear day, the Greek island of Lesbos.

The largest island, Cunda (also called Alibey), is joined to the mainland by a road across Lale Island, partly causeway and partly bridge. South of the town, the hill of Şeytan Sofrası, “the Devil’s Table”, is where people go to watch the sun set over the islands.

A town with two names

For most of its history the town was Greek-speaking and Greek Orthodox, and it was known in Greek as Kydonies, or Aivali. The war years changed that. Deportations during the First World War and the fighting of 1919-22 emptied much of the town, and the population exchange of 1923 completed the Orthodox community’s departure to Greece. Muslim families from Lesbos, Crete and other parts of Greece settled in their place.

You can still read that history in the streets. The Saatli Camii, the “mosque with the clock”, was once the Greek church of Agios Ioannis. On Cunda, the old Taksiyarhis church is now a museum. The historic centre, with its stone houses and narrow lanes, has been a protected conservation area since the 1970s.

Oil and soap

Ayvalık lives on olives. The hills around it are covered in groves of the local variety, the Ayvalık olive, also known as Edremit, and the town’s oil is registered in Türkiye as a designation of origin, Ayvalık Zeytinyağı.

From the nineteenth century the town filled with stone factories that pressed the oil and turned part of it into soap. Their tall brick chimneys still stand along the shore and between the houses. Some kept working late into the twentieth century; others have been empty for decades. In 2017 Türkiye put the town’s industrial landscape on UNESCO’s Tentative List for World Heritage, and in 2024 one restored oil and soap factory reopened as a museum.

When we drew the mill in Honest Weight, we gave it that kind of history: a family firm with a soap works beside the press hall. Everything inside the mill is invented.

The season

Picking begins in October. The main harvest and pressing run from about November into December, and sometimes into January. The case is set inside that season, on the last night of pressing before a holiday, when everyone wants the work finished.

How we used all this

We do not write a case to teach history. But a case only feels fair when the world around the evidence holds together: the names, the forms, the season and the way people talk. For Honest Weight that meant Turkish names and titles used the way people use them, official forms laid out the way a Turkish office would lay them out, and statements read with a light Turkish accent.

The people and what happened to them are fiction. The town that holds them is not.

How to play a murder mystery online with friends

2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

A murder mystery works best with other people. One of you notices the date on a letter, another remembers a time from a statement, and a third asks the question nobody wanted to ask. You do not need to be in the same city for that. This note explains how to run an evening on Murder Desk with friends who are somewhere else.

What you need

Two to six people. A room holds up to six.
A browser each, on a laptop if possible. A phone works, but reading long documents is easier on a bigger screen.
A call. Use whatever your group already uses for voice or video. Murder Desk has no chat of its own, on purpose: talking it through is the game.
No accounts. Everyone chooses a nickname. Keep the recovery code the site gives you, because it brings your progress back on another device.

Choose a case that fits the evening

Each case page gives its difficulty and its playing time. For a first evening, pick something your group can finish in one sitting:

the training case, Closing Time, takes 20 to 30 minutes and teaches every part of the game;
an Easy case takes about an hour;
a Medium case takes a long evening;
a Hard case takes two to three hours, which many groups spread over two nights.

Times are for a group reading together. Groups usually read slower than one person, and they argue more, which is the point.

Open a room, step by step

One person is the host. The host:

Opens the case page and presses Open the case.
Types a detective nickname and presses Start investigating. The site then shows a recovery code. Save it: it brings your progress back on another device.
Chooses Create a team room.
Shares the room. The room page shows a six-character code, a link and a QR code. Paste the link into your group chat, read the code out on the call, or let people scan the QR code with their phone camera.

Everyone else:

Opens the link, or scans the QR code. The page says Join your team.
Types a detective nickname, saves the recovery code, and presses Join room.

No link? Open the same case, choose a nickname, then type the code in the Room code box under Join a team room and press Join room. A code has six characters: letters and the digits 2 to 9. There is no I, O, 0 or 1, so nobody mixes them up.

When everyone is in, the room page lists the members, with the host marked. Open the Evidence desk and start reading. A room takes up to six people, and new people can join until the host opens voting.

Inside a room:

Everyone sees the same files. When someone opens a sealed file, it opens for the whole room.
Hints are shared, and so is their cost. A hint one person takes comes off everyone’s score, so agree before anyone asks Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone votes alone. This is the part groups like most. You can agree on the evidence and still disagree on the verdict, and each person locks their own five-part vote. Nobody sees anyone else’s answers until the reveal.
The host decides when the talking stops. When the room is ready, the host opens voting. The room reveals every vote and the solution when everyone has voted, when the host closes voting, or 48 hours after voting opened.

The full rules are on the how to play page.

Split the reading

Reading every document aloud is slow, and reading in silence on a call is awkward. This works better:

Share out the papers. Each person takes a few documents and reads them alone for ten minutes.
Report back in two sentences each. What is the paper, and what does it claim? Only that.
Read the important ones together. When two summaries clash, open both documents and read them aloud.

It also helps to give people jobs, and to swap them each evening:

the clerk keeps the timeline;
the sceptic asks “how do we know that?” after every theory;
the board keeper pins papers to the murder board and ties the string.

Play over several evenings

Nothing is lost when you hang up. The room keeps its opened files, its hints and its deductions on the server. A sealed file makes a good place to stop: open it at the start of the next evening, when everyone is fresh.

Two things to know:

a room that never reaches voting closes 14 days after it was opened, so do not leave a long gap;
each nickname plays a case once, so a player who started the same case alone cannot join a room for it.

Playing at the same table

If your group meets in person, you can still use a room, with everyone on their own device. You can also print the papers you have opened, with blank notebook and timeline sheets, from the case menu.

Keep the case for the next group

Please do not post answers where others can see them. The result card you can share at the end shows your score and rank, and nothing about the solution.

Start with the short one

If your group has not played before, open a room on Closing Time first. It takes half an hour, and afterwards everyone knows how files, gates, hints and the vote work.

How to read a murder mystery case file like a detective

2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

A case file is not a story told in order. It is a pile of papers written by people who each saw a small part of what happened, and some of them are wrong. Your job is to put the pile in order, find where the papers disagree, and decide which one to believe.

This is the method we use when we test our own cases. It works for any case-file game. The examples below are invented for this note; none of them comes from a Murder Desk case.

1. Start with the briefing, then read everything once

Most new players skip the briefing and go straight into the files. Read it first. It sums up what the original investigation decided had happened, and it lists exactly what you have to work out.

Then read the rest of the file once, without taking notes. On the first pass, read fast. Do not try to solve anything yet. You only want the shape of the case: who the people are, where the places are, and roughly when things happened.

Notes taken on the first pass tend to fix your first impression in ink. Wait until you know what is in the file before you decide what matters.

2. Build the timeline before you build a theory

Go through the file again, this time with a pen. Every paper that carries a time goes on the timeline: receipts, tickets, logs, phone records, letters with a date, and the time a witness says they heard something.

Write three things for each line:

the time;
what happened;
where you read it.

The third column is the important one. “19:37, coffee paid for at the station café (the receipt)” is evidence. “About nine, he left (his sister says)” is a claim. Both go on the timeline, but they are not worth the same.

When the timeline is done, look at the gaps. A gap of forty minutes in the evening of the death, for the one person who says they were at home, is where your questions start.

3. Keep what a witness saw apart from what they decided

People rarely lie as much as they assume. Read each statement and mark every sentence as one of these:

seen or heard: “I heard a door slam just after the news started”;
decided: “so he must have gone out”;
told: “my neighbour said she saw a light”.

Only the first kind is evidence. The second is the witness doing your job for you, and often doing it badly. A witness who heard a door may be right about the door and wrong about whose door it was.

4. Test every account against paper

An alibi is a claim. A ticket, a till receipt, a timesheet or a logbook entry is a record. When a claim and a record disagree, the record usually wins.

Usually, not always. Ask three questions about every record:

Who wrote it, and did they have a reason to get it wrong?
When was it written: at the time, or afterwards from memory?
Does it prove what it seems to prove? A receipt shows that something was paid for. It does not show who was holding the wallet.

5. Look for the paper that should exist

Missing evidence is evidence too. If someone says they took the last train, there should be a ticket, a guard or a timetable that agrees. If there is nothing, write that down.

Look the other way as well: a paper that should not exist at all. Why would anyone keep that note, or write that letter on that day?

6. Keep every person in play until something rules them out

It is easy to like or dislike the people in a file. Neither is a reason. Keep a short list of everyone who could have been there, and cross a name off only when a paper puts that person somewhere else. Write the reason next to the line.

A suspect you crossed off on the first evening because they seemed kind is a suspect you never really tested.

7. Opportunity, then means, then motive

Work in this order:

Opportunity comes from the timeline. Who could have been there?
Means comes from the scene and the reports. Who could have done it that way?
Motive comes last. It is the easiest part to imagine and the hardest to prove, so do not let it lead.

8. Before you vote, prove it with two papers

On Murder Desk, a verdict has five parts: who did it, how, why, the period when that person’s own account is false, and the two exhibits that prove it best. The last part is the test of your whole case. If you cannot point to two papers that together show it, you have a strong feeling, not a solution.

Go back to the timeline, find the moment where one account and one record cannot both be true, and name both.

9. Ask for help early, not late

Every case has hints from Sherlock Holmes. They start vague and get more precise, and each one costs points. If you have been stuck on the same question for twenty minutes, take the first hint. It usually points you back to a paper you have already read, which is the best kind of hint.

Try it on a short file

The training case, Closing Time, is short enough to try this method in one sitting. Open it, build the timeline first, and see how long it takes before one of the accounts stops fitting.

Why Sherlock Holmes gives the hints

2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

On every Murder Desk case there is a black telephone on the desk. Pick it up, and Sherlock Holmes gives you a hint: first a gentle one, then a sharper one, and each one costs you points. He is our favourite detective, and this note is about why we put him on the line.

The detective of Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle, a young doctor who wrote stories while he waited for patients. Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, sharing rooms at 221B Baker Street with Dr John Watson, who tells most of the stories.

Doyle went on to write four novels and fifty-six short stories about him. Most of the stories first appeared in The Strand Magazine, from 1891, and they made Holmes the most famous detective in the world.

“You see, but you do not observe”

Holmes says that to Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), and it is the heart of his method. Watson has climbed the same stairs hundreds of times; Holmes knows how many steps there are. The difference is not cleverness. It is attention.

That is exactly what a case file asks of you. The answer is almost never hidden. It sits in a paper you have already read, waiting for you to notice it.

The real doctor behind him

Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh, and one of his teachers was Dr Joseph Bell. Bell liked to look at a new patient and tell the students, before the patient said a word, where they had been and what they did for a living, all from small signs: a tan, a way of standing, the wear on a pair of hands. Doyle later said that Holmes was built on Bell.

So the most famous fictional detective began with a real habit: look closely, and let the small things speak.

The detective who would not stay away

Doyle grew tired of Holmes and tried to end the stories in “The Final Problem” (1893). Readers were furious. Holmes came back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-02) and returned to Baker Street for good in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). More than a century later, readers still will not let him go, and neither will we.

Why he gives the hints

He points at the evidence. A good hint from Holmes does not hand you the answer. It sends you back to a paper you have already read and asks you to look again.
He is patient. His first hint is always a nudge. Only if you ask again does he say more.
He is honest about the cost. Every hint takes points off your score, and the telephone tells you how many before you ask, so you decide when it is worth it.

His best-known rule fits a case file perfectly. In The Sign of the Four (1890) he asks Watson how often he has said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Rule people out with paper, one by one, and see who is left.

Read a story, then pick up the telephone

Conan Doyle died in 1930, and the Holmes stories are now in the public domain, free for anyone to read. If you have never read one, start with “A Scandal in Bohemia” or The Hound of the Baskervilles. Then open a case, and when you are stuck, pick up the telephone.

Why we make Murder Desk

2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Murder Desk is written by Tifa. This note is about why it exists, and how we make the cases.

It started with a player

Tifa used to love playing printed cold-case games: a box of police papers, an evening, and a killer to name. After many of them, some things started to stand out: parts that could be fairer, clearer, or simply done a different way. Murder Desk is our attempt at that different way.

Why a detective’s desk

A case file lets you play the way a detective really works. On Murder Desk you sit in a detective’s office late at night, with the file open on the desk: reports, statements, letters, receipts and recordings. You can pick up any paper, write your own notes, and pin the evidence to a murder board on the wall, with red string between the clues that belong together.

Nobody explains the case to you. You put the papers in order and decide what really happened.

Real places, real periods

Each case is set in a real region at a real time: a village in Alsace in 2004, a glassworks village in southern Sweden in 1993, a hostal off a Madrid square in 2002, and the olive coast near Ayvalık in 2009. The people and the crimes are invented, and so are some of the villages and buildings. The regions, the trades and the way people live are researched, because a case only feels fair when the world around it holds together.

Our favourite so far is Ayvalık, the town behind Honest Weight. Ayvalık is known across Türkiye for its olive oil, and the case grew out of that real trade. That is what makes it feel less like a made-up story and more like a file that could really exist.

Tested before it goes live

A good case can be solved from the papers alone. Before a case goes live, Tifa plays it, then friends play it, and then it goes through blind tests with AI solvers that are given the evidence and never the solution. If they cannot reach the answer from the papers, the case changes.

The answers themselves never reach your browser until you have earned them. Sealed files, hints and the solution come from the server only when you open them, so nobody can read the answer in the page’s source code.

No ads, no trackers

There are no adverts and no trackers on the site, and it uses only one strictly necessary cookie. You play with a nickname; an email address is optional. The privacy page explains exactly what is stored and how to delete it.

What comes next

We are aiming for a new case almost every week, along with new features and new ways to look at the evidence, using AI tools for pictures, voices and video.

If you want to hear about new cases, these notes have a feed. Or start with the training case, which takes about half an hour.