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.