A Christmas Murder Mystery Party Is the Easiest Way to Save the Office Do

The office Christmas party has a structural problem, and everyone knows it without saying it out loud: you are asking people who only talk about work to talk about something else, in a room, sober-ish, for three hours.

So they talk about work. Then they drink. Then it gets awkward.

What a mystery actually fixes

It gives everybody a reason to speak to somebody they do not normally speak to. That is the whole trick.

The person from accounts has to interrogate the person from the warehouse, because the game says so. Nobody has to invent small talk. The structure does it for them, and by the second round people have forgotten they were being awkward.

Running it around a meal

This is the part hosts get wrong. Do not try to run a mystery during dinner — people cannot eat, read a sheet and accuse each other at once.

The shape that works: drinks and first round before the food, the meal in the middle while people talk about what they have worked out, then the final rounds and the reveal after. The break makes the reveal land harder, because everyone has spent the main course arguing about it.

Family Christmas is a different problem

With family, the difficulty is age range. A game pitched at adults leaves the twelve-year-old out; a game pitched at children bores everyone else.

Two things help. Give younger guests a character with a clear, simple secret — something they can do rather than infer. And put the reveal before people get too tired, not at the end of a long day of eating.

Say it early

Whether it is the office or the family, tell people this is happening before they turn up. "We are doing a murder mystery, you will get your character next week" gives people time to be pleased about it.

Sprung on the night, half the room decides they are not the sort of person who does this. Given a week, almost nobody does.