Clue® The Party

Last month I threw my first Murder Mystery party and it was awesome! So awesome that I am blogging about it so that I can post it on pinterest and hopefully inspire others.

Miss Scarlett from the original Cluedo®.
I used pictures of old card as table
decorations.

The Invites 

I started by sending out the invitations. My party was based on a mix between the movie and the board game so I used the letter from the movie for my invitation. My little brother played Wadsworth in a stage rendition of the movie so he had the letter memorized. Here is what the Letter looked like;

Mr Smith,

Your presence is requested for a dinner being held on Thursday the Twelfth of July, 2012, at the Rawlins Estate located at 123 N 456 W Sunshine Town, USA. Drinks will be served at six o’clock p.m. and dinner will begin promptly at six-thirty p.m. You will be given the pseudonym of Professor Plum for the evening.

It will be to your advantage to be present on this date because a Mr. Boddy will bring to end a certain confidential, longstanding and painful financial liability.

Sincerely yours,

A Friend.  

P.S. The evening will be based on both the Clue board game and the Clue movie. Your dress and conduct should reflect accordingly. You may choose your clothing based on either or a mix of both. 

Expect food, movies, and mystery. I look forward to your attendance. 

I had previously made a facebook event to make sure that I had a guest list in tact (this party doesn't really work without everyone there) and it was a way for me to get everyone's mailing address. I sent the actual had invite in a hand addressed letter with a wax seal! I bought the seal at Michael's for like 5 bucks and then used it as one of the prizes for the party. I think it was a fun little addition.

The Dining 

No one is ever on time so that is why I had the 6-6:30 "drinks" time. I put together a wet bar with OJ, Root Beer, Bloody Mary Mix, and Crystal Light--you cannot have a gathering of friends without crystal light. As the guests arrived Wadsworth (my little brother) greeted them at the door, took their coats, and led them into the "sitting room" where I was waiting to serve them drinks. Everyone chatted and caught up while we waited for the rest of the guests.

For dinner I had prepared an outdoor table because we don't have a formal dining room at my house. I used this trick that I found on interest (link below) to create placeholders with each sudonym (Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green ect.) It made the table setting a little more fun plus I am a control freak so I wanted to pick where everyone would sit. (The names did wash off in the dish washer so it wasn't permanent but it worked for dinner!) I just placed the dished with the different courses on top of this plate.

Source: indulgy.com via Whitney on Pinterest

I also researched a little napkin folding and went with the Crown fold that I found on napkinfoldingguide.com. Luckily my house had just been in the home show and so we had a set of matching place mats and napkins that our interior decorator had picked out, as well as some new dishes. In my 20 years of living my family has never has a single table setting where everything matched--until this night. I wish I would have taken a picture of the table setting because I was quite proud of it but, alas, I forgot. I guess you'll just have to trust me on how nice it looked. Luckily my house had just been in the home show and so we had a set of matching place mats and napkins that our interior decorator had picked out, as well as some new dishes. In my 20 years of living my family has never has a single table setting where everything matched--until this night.

I had so much fun with this I got a little carried away and probably spent 4 or 5 hours just researching the history of Clue® and all its different variations. As a way to actually apply all that time to my party I made some question and answer cards and added them to the table setting as a conversation starter. I also printed out a copy of one character card from each of the main additions of Clue® and it's British counterpart Cluedo® as well as some of the special additions. I added these to the table as embellishments. Sadly, my guests didn't pay as much attention to them as I would have hoped; I guess not everyone finds the history of board games as interesting as I. I don't regret making them though, it is the little details that really makes or breaks an event in my opinion.

The Set Up 

The Guests at Dinner

Once we had the salad and main course we moved back into the "sitting room" for desert--mini strawberry shortcakes! While eating my amazing little brother busted out the dirty secrets! Since he had played Wadsworth on stage, he had the whole scene memorized where Wadsworth reveals the purpose of the dinner--blackmail--and what each person was being blackmailed for. He adjusted it a little because he couldn't expect my guests to respond with the dialog from the movie but it was a seamless adjustment and his monologue was hilarious!  It was especially fun to see my friends reactions when they were accused of murder or sex scandals. I don't think they realized until this point how devoted I was to the whole Clue experience. I do have to give props to my little bro though, this whole portion of the party was all his! And, staying true to the movie, once the guests got there he did all the talking and arranging while I got to be the quiet and unassuming maid. We also skipped over the whole Mr. Boddy thing by saying he was already dead and that one of us had done it. Then I handed out the color-coded gift bags that he had prepared while he explained that what we needed to solve the mystery was in these bags. The bags each included a weapon, a detective notebook and the pre-delt cards.

My friend and I had gone to an antique shop close to my house to track down the weapons. We found a fake revolver (actually an old avon cologne bottle), a candle stick, a vial of poison (I used instead of a led pipe), a sa-weet old wrench. My brother had a dagger from india and my dad had a rope which he tied into a legitimate noose for me! The props--like most of the stuff in this party--were an  unnecessary addition but they were totally fun to have!  For the detective notebooks I bought some 50¢ 3x5 notebooks and used scrapbook paper to color-code them and create a pocket in which to hold one's cards. Then I made the checklists similar the the papers that come in the game but substituting my own characters and rooms and glued them to the first three pages of the notebooks (Rooms, Weapons, Suspects) in random order so you wouldn't be able to tell what someone was marking off based on how many pages they turned.

Mr. Wadsworth (My little bro.) With the Weapons

The Game

My Card as Evette the Maid

Now to the fun part; the game!! At first I was planning on using the cards from the board game except for the character cards, which I would make using a photo from each of my guests (another good reason for the facebook group.)  Then I changed some of the names of the rooms to work better in my house so I had to make my own room cards as well. Then, on the day of the party, I realized that it would be easy to tell which cards I had made and which were from the game thus revealing when someone had a weapon card which--if you've played the game you would know--is unacceptable. So I ended up making all of my own cards. I ended up using a different format for each type of card depending on which would be the easiest to recreate. For the character cards I based them off of the 1986 version, the room cards I based off of the xxxxx version with shots of things from around my house, and then for the weapon cards I just copied a photo of the cards from the master sleuth edition and formatted them to my own card template. I have access to a color laser printer (so nice!) so I just printed and cut them myself then I took them to Kinko's and got them laminated. I had to make my own character cards because I added two extra players (Wadsworth and Evette) but if you wanted to simplify this whole thing I would recommend just having 6 people and adapting to the exists cards. Or get one of the editions (like master sleuth) with extra players and weapons.

I had designated a room in my house to be one of each of the nine rooms and put signs up with that blue sticky tack. I had four in the basement and five on the main floor. Because I don't have little squares between each of the rooms in my house, we changed the game play a little bit. Instead of rolling a dice each player flipped a coin when it was his/her turn. Heads meant you had to move to a room on a different floor and Tails meant you had to stay on the same floor (or in the same room.) Then we all moved to whichever room that player picked and the next turn would be based off of that room. In the original game people are always in different rooms which wouldn't be very much fun for my purposes. We did have two secret passages that took you between floors. Much like the board game, if you were in a room with a secret passage you could move to the room on the other end of that passage regardless of what you rolled. These passages can really just be in theory (maybe with a sign to represent it) since most houses don't actually have secret passages. In my house we used the elevator as one passage and the walk-out basement as another.

Cln. Mustard With His Detective Notebook

Obviously to do it this way you need to have a decent sized house especially if you don't want to use any bedrooms. I think it would be a perfectly acceptable alternative to use the game board instead of the whole house at this point. It would still be a fun party and, by using the materials already provided in the game, it is substantially less work. (I probably put 20-30 hours working on this party and about 300 dollars!)  The other thing is that it got a little tiring walking up and down the stairs and all around the house for every single turn. There was a long stretch towards the end of the first game where everyone had gotten comfortable in the theater and so no one chose to move to a different room. The other thing is that moving through the house contributed to the game taking a little longer. During the second game I offered to let everyone just play from the sitting room but they all wanted to continue the way we were going so it must have added something right?


The other thing that I didn't think about is we were playing with eight players but didn't add any additional room or weapon cards which made it so everyone only started with two or three cards. That also made the game go a little longer because you had less to work with from the beginning. But Clue® is a pretty quick game to begin with so it wasn't so bad that it took us some extra time.

The Prizes 

Originally I planned to get 6 prizes, on for each of my guests, but I ran out of time, money, and ideas. So I did 4 prizes instead. One for the winner of the first and second game. (Or if we ran out of time to do 2 games the murderer of the first game would get a prize.) I also had everyone vote for best costume and best detective which was just a cute name for the person who devoted the most to his/her character. Each of those people got to choose a card. Unfortunately (but not really unfortunate at all) I was both the winner and the murderer of the first game. I guess most hostesses would have let one of their guests win but I happen to be much too competitive for that. So I ended up giving the first two prizes to the winner and the murderer of the second game. My prizes were a Clue® board game (a reproduction of the original edition), a dvd of Clue® the Movie, a $25 gift card to the local movie theater, and the wax seal stamp that I used for the invitations plus an extra box of sealing wax. I was hoping one of the boys would get the movie gift card and take me on a date but I guess we don't all get what we want.

The Movie

We finished up the night by retiring to the theater to watch Clue® the Movie. I was in the middle of unpacking my boxes from my recent move so I hadn't found my dvd but no one seemed to mind me using the prize dvd.

It was really a fantastic night and I encourage anyone who's been needing something to do to try hosting a murder mystery party! I have been to a few and they are always so fun! The nice thing about doing it this way (based off of Clue®) is that you don't have to write your own murder mystery or buy one of those kits. Beside, the kind where everyone has a script type thing and is told when exactly to reveal certain details isn't as fun for the players and are hardly ever solved before the end. This way, people are actually playing a mystery solving game and can choose to portray their characters however they want (or not at all if your friends aren't the performing type).

Hope you've enjoyed this [awesome] idea of mine and that it inspires you to try something fun with your friends!