One of the most regular requests we’ve had recently has been for mix and mingle parties.
The answer is yes. But whenever we’ve provided one so far, our mix and mingle parties have always been custom written to the guest list as it’s not actually as easy as it soundss to provide a game that has an undefined number of guests, an undefined level of mixing, an undefined “acting ability” and an undefined level of involvement for all concerned.
The quick answer is “no”. But actually that’s not strictly true. It IS possible to generate a mix and mingle game using our “skit and clue” style large group games.
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.
Over the course of 2015 we plan to develop a series of mix and mingle style games, but ones that are easy to play, unlike the more traditional “free form” character games where everyone has to ad lib throughout the night, and which scare many people away from mix and mingle style evenings as they are too difficult to run. In the meantime we hope this information sheet helps those who are trying to work out how to run a game in mix and mingle format until then!
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.
