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.