Notes from building printable party games
We draw murder mysteries, advent calendars and mahjong reference sheets, page by page, and then read the reviews of everybody else's. These are the notes: how to host the evening, what to print, what breaks, and what to check before you buy anything.
Start with the free one. The Wet Half-Hour is a complete four-player murder mystery: four suspects, eleven printed documents, forty-five minutes. No email address, no sign-up, and the answer is in a separate sealed file so whoever prints it can still play.
The guides
- How to host a murder mystery dinner party at home
The two decisions that make the evening: whether the host can play, and what happens when somebody arrives at nine. With a timetable and a week-before checklist.
- How many people do you need for a murder mystery party?
What actually changes at 4, at 8, at 12, at 16 and at 40 — and what quietly breaks when you are at the edge of a game's range.
- What you actually have to print, and how to cut it
The print list, the paper, the ink, the four settings that ruin it, and the one-sheet test that catches everything.
- What goes wrong at murder mystery parties
Nine failure modes taken from real reviews of games that are still selling, and the design choice that prevents each one.
- A murder mystery for the work Christmas party
The seven things a workplace game must not contain, the logistics nobody warns you about, and what structural safety looks like.
- Advent calendar ideas for adults
Ten formats that are not twenty-four small chocolates, what each really costs, and the design question that decides whether it survives past the 9th.
- Christmas party games for teens and adults
Eight that work in a room spanning three generations, four to avoid, and how to run the evening rather than just choose the game.
- American mahjong for beginners
The tiles, the deal, the Charleston, the turn, the calls, the jokers and the settle-up, with the four mistakes beginners make marked as you go.
- How to read a mahjong card
The shorthand decoded: the numbers, the letters, what the colours really mean, and the X and C at the end of the line.
- How to host a mahjong night
Four players, three hours, and the six decisions that turn one evening into a fortnightly habit.
Who writes this
A Maison Soirée is a small studio that makes printable party games. Everything on this site comes out of building them: the legibility rules came from reading a year of one-star reviews about type that could not be read by candlelight; the fair-play method came from auditing our own Christmas mystery fact by fact, 58 rows, until every one of them was printed on a document rather than living in somebody's head; the advice about hosts came from the discovery that "the host can play too" is usually not true.
We try to be accurate about what we have and have not tested. Our games have been read-tested — a fresh reader given only the player-facing files, asked to solve it, and asked to score it — and that is a different thing from a room of twelve people with plates in their hands. Where we have not done the room test, we say so, here and on the listings.
If you want the finished products, they are on Etsy: the A Maison Soirée shop. Nothing is sold on this site.