Are mix and mingle style murder mystery games possible?

Are mix and mingle style murder mystery games possible?

One of the most regular requests we’ve had recently has been for mix and mingle parties.

Is it possible to do it?
The answer is yes. But there are lots of different ways of playing mix and mingle games so it’s not a one-size-fits-all. Fortunately we aren’t a one-size-fits-all sort of a firm! Which means you have several options!

So… before we can go into how to do a mix and mingle game – it’s worth trying to find out what you mean by that. It could mean you have a fluid number of guests. Or that you don’t have space for a dinner party – but you’ve a set number. It might be that you need something very “low key” in the background, or this could be the main event, and you’re thinking more along the LARP role playing lines. If you aren’t sure – just call us! As we can’t provide an answer without knowing the question – but we can help you identify what questions you should be asking yourself!

Can you play any of our “off the shelf” games as mix and mingle?
The quick answer is YES. And there are three games that lend themselves to this – although you will need to do some adaptation to a few of them….

Dinner party games

You can run these “mix and mingle” if you have to by breaking out the questions from the booklets so every guest has a question menu for all the other guests, rather than listening to each other throughout the night. You can often even ditch the scripted dialogues between rounds if you have to. (Though we think it’s more fun if they’re in it).

We can email you a question menu free if you ask. Just get in touch. The games aren’t designed like that – but they do play that way as well. It just means every round lasts longer as each person has to speak to everyone else. It also gets a bit samey as you have to answer the same questions for everyone in the room rather than ham them up once for all. But it works, and it’s a really quick way of fixing the “I haven’t enough space” option!

Skit and clue games

You can turn these into mix and mingle as well – though not all guests will have a character in the plot.

To make things easy, what you need is at least 6 willing volunteers to do a little “acting”; someone to act as host to oversee events, and one big area where all the guests can mingle to watch the two scenes the actors will act out during the course of the night.

The “actors” don’t need to know who has committed the crime, and they can act “script in hand” during the party too, so it doesn’t matter if they haven’t learned their lines. It’ll still work fine.

Then, rather than forming teams, as the “skit and clue” format suggests, the clues are distributed around the attending guests instead. As there are over 100 clues each round, it means some guests will have more than one (unless you have a very big party!)

Rather than inundate the guests with lots of information, the best thing to do is weed out the “extra” clues, there will always be one or two in a set of 100 that provide useless information, red herrings, or duplicate information. Removing these will often mean you can whittle the number of clues down to nearer 50-70 each round.

Then you can look at the clues you have left and decide if any work as physical props which you can leave about the house. E.g. there might be a clue which relates to Rat poison – in which case you can label up a bottle as “rat poison” and stick an “evidence” label on it so guests can move around the house spotting evidence as well as exchanging clues between each other.

During the evening guests can either swap clues OR keep all the information to themselves and swap the information they know for other information as they mix as a group; and other than removing the teams, this part of the evening runs exactly as it would do if you were hosting a large group dinner party game.

Multi-room games

These are designed specifically FOR mix and mingle events. Run like a live action cluedo house, guest visit each suspect, and hunt for clues. You can leave everyone to mix and meet the suspects however you like, or you can timetable people to avoid bottle necks. You can remove the “monologues” and just ask the cast to mingle if you think that will work better. As the cast carry the mystery and know all the back story – it’s very much up to the guests to become the detectives and get to the root of the matter however they choose.

LARP / Immersive role play

Wow – you are thinking big aren’t you?

Yes we can design these. They are however incredibly complex and NOT for the feint of heart! They are costly to create especially if you have a lot of guests – and you’ll need someone to play “master of ceremonies” but yes – we can design these if you want. Just a word of caution – these are NOT for first timers. They also don’t suit those who prefer to be passive. I love games, and I love acting, but I can’t think of anything worse than trying to play a fully immersive game all evening.

Do you have any other suggestions?
Something we’ve suggested to a number of people this year is to run a mix and mingle game in a similar way to Cluedo – or in other words, a “what’s missing” game. Give you guests a list of rooms, murderers, and weapons, and create cards which each guest will hold which provide an alibi for a suspect or a location of a murder weapon. Guests can then tick off the cards as they see them to work out “What’s missing”, or if you prefer – just do the same thing with Cluedo cards, providing you have enough to go around.

It means “no acting” required – but it’ll suit a very informal mix and mingle.