Tonight’s activity was an entertaining affair–a murder mystery dinner party in celebration of my good friend Sam’s 30th birthday. (Sam, incidentally, does not know anyone called either “Don Woods” or “Pook” and would like to make that fact abundantly clear.)

For those who have never attended a murder mystery party, it’s an enormously fun opportunity for a bunch of people to get together, eat, drink, dress up in silly costumes and then make twats of themselves with each other. Ostensibly, it’s a game where everyone is supposed to “role-play” their characters and through careful questioning, determine who the murderer was.

In practice, it’s an excuse for people to talk in silly accents, overact and generally lark about. It’s a pretty far cry from what tabletop enthusiasts would call “traditional” role-playing, but in actuality it’s pretty close to what your common or garden D&D group gets up to. Only probably with more comedy French accents and less in the way of dice-rolling. Which is good. Because the dice-rolling bit of role-playing is often seen as the “geeky bit”, whereas with a bit of encouragement, most people can enjoy a bit of impromptu improvisatory theatre, especially when their confidence glands have been appropriately lubricated via the judicious application of alcohol.

Tonight was no exception to the above rules. A diverse group of people attended and hammed it up through three acts of questioning, accusations and gradually-escalating amounts of backstabbing, espionage and clandestine affairs. As the evening went on, people gradually grew much more comfortable with the whole experience and started ad-libbing somewhat. Mostly, it has to be said, with some fairly filthy comments. But that added to the fun. Particularly as the amount of wine consumed throughout the evening meant that everyone’s accents suffered somewhat.

So if you’re looking for an opportunity to get some people together, dress up in silly costumes and engage in a spot of light role-playing (of the non-filthy kind) then a murder mystery party is the way to go. The set we played–The Brie, The Bullet and The Black Cat–was structured pretty well, with handouts and helpful prompts for all characters, meaning that no-one was left flagging and having to come up with questions all by themselves. It worked well, even though only one amongst our number managed to correctly identify the murderers by the end of the whole experience.

It was a good laugh, though, and surely that’s the point of any game when it comes down to it.

The group are now settling down to a game of Eat Poop You Cat! which I discovered the other day can be referred to as Broken Telephone in polite circles. Wine has been consumed, so I anticipate that the sentences and drawings produced throughout the course of the game will be somewhat spectacular.

It’s up and out early tomorrow morning for a run, with a change of scenery for once as I’m in Winchester instead of back home. I hope it’s not cold.