On account of the pandemic, I'd expected my fortieth birthday to be a somewhat more-muted affair than I'd hoped. I had a banner, I got trolled by bagels, and I received as a gift a pizza oven with which I immediately set fire to several pieces of cookware, but I hadn't expected to be able to do anything like the "surprise" party of my thirtieth, and that saddened me a little. So imagine my surprise when I come back from an evening walk the day after my birthday to discover than an actual (remote) surprise party really had been arranged without my knowing!
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Matt, Suz, Alec, Jen, Dermot and Doreen on a Google Meet screen.
Not content with merely getting a few folks together for drinks, though, Ruth and team had gone to great trouble (involving lots of use of the postal service) arranging a "kit" murder mystery party in the Inspector McClue series - The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame - for us all to play. The story is sort-of a spiritual successor to The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, which we'd played fifteen years earlier. Minor spoilers follow.
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JTA (wearing a string of pearls) and Robin (wearing sunglasses)
Naturally, I immediately felt underdressed, having not been instructed that I might need a costume, and underprepared, having only just heard for the first time that I would be playing the part of German security sidekick Lieutenant Kurt Von Strohm minutes before I had to attempt my most outrageous German accent.
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Dan with his tongue out holding a glass of champagne.
The plot gave me in particular a certain sense of deja vu. In The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, I played a French nightclub owner who later turned out to be an English secret agent supplying the French Resistance with information. But in The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame I played a Gestapo officer who... also later turned out to be an English secret agent infiltrating the regime and, you guessed it, supplying the French Resistance.
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Jen drinking from the neck of a nearly-empty wine bottle.
It was not the smoothest nor the most-sophisticated "kit" murder mystery we've enjoyed. The technology made communication challenging, the reveal was less-satisfying than some others etc. But the company was excellent. (And the acting way pretty good too, especially by our murderer whose character was exquisitely played.)
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JTA downing a Jeroboam of champagne.
And of course the whole thing quickly descended into a delightful shouting match with accusations flying left, right, and centre and nobody having a clue what was going on. Like all of our murder mystery parties!
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Google Meet transcript with the words "You are the Jewish", which nobody said.
In summary, the weekend of my fortieth birthday was made immeasurably better by getting to hang out with (and play a stupid game with) some of my friends despite the lockdown, and I'm ever so grateful that those closest to me were able to make such a thing happen (and without me even noticing in advance).
My niece shared this game with me, but pieces are missiong. Can you help me?
I need Exhibit A and Exhibit B (missing from my game).
She sent her invitations. Do the invitations include any character information? Those are missing, too.
I found your bog online. Hope you can send me photos.
Mary Grace
Oakland, CA
I'm afraid I probably can't be of any help. When we played this game (almost five years ago) we did it remotely, over videoconferencing. To make that work, my partner needed to post all of the exhibits and booklets to the relevant players so they'd have them to-hand at the relevant part of the mystery.
I'm not sure who got the exhibits that you're missing, but I can't imagine that they retained them after the event. Similarly, I don't expect we kept any of the bits of our (now partial) kit after the fact either. Sorry!
Good luck with it!