What you actually have to print for a murder mystery party (and how to cut it)
Most of the one-star reviews in this category are about printing, not plot. Here is the print list, the paper, the ink, the cutting, and the four settings that go wrong.
A printable party game is a PDF that becomes a physical object on your kitchen table two days before the party, usually at eleven at night. Everything that can go wrong in that translation goes wrong to somebody, and it is worth twenty minutes of planning because the failures are expensive: wrong paper size, colour cartridge empty, type too small to read by lamplight, forty pages printed before you noticed the margins were cut off.
The four print settings that ruin it
- Scale. Set it to Actual size or 100%, never Fit to page. Fit-to-page silently shrinks everything by about 4% and moves every cut line. If a game has cards that are supposed to be 3.5 by 5 inches, fit-to-page is why yours are not.
- Paper size. US Letter and A4 are different shapes, not just different sizes. A well-made game gives you both as separate files, or lays everything out inside an area that fits both. Ours are drawn on a single canvas 595 by 792 points — the overlap of Letter and A4 — and then placed centred on each, so the two editions are identical at 100%.
- Duplex. If anything prints double-sided, run one test sheet first and check which edge it flips on. Short-edge binding turns every second page upside down.
- Greyscale. Printing a colour design in greyscale is not the same as a designed black-and-white edition. Pale gold on cream becomes pale grey on white. If a game offers a low-ink edition, use it — and if it does not, print your test page in greyscale before you commit.
The print list for a dinner-party mystery
Roughly, and in the order you will want them:
| What | Paper | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Host sheet | Plain, 1 page | Read this before you print anything else |
| Guest how-to-play | Plain, 1 page | One copy on the table is enough |
| Character cards | Cardstock if you have it | These get handled all evening. 160–200 gsm is plenty |
| Case documents, round 1 | Plain | Goes on the table before anyone arrives |
| Case documents, rounds 2 and 3 | Plain | Into envelopes, with the opening time written on the outside |
| Shared board / grid | Plain, or A3 if you can | The one sheet everyone writes on |
| Ballots | Plain | One per guest plus two spares |
| The sealed answer | Plain | Print without opening. Into an envelope immediately |
For six to twelve guests that is usually 30 to 45 sides. A big-room game is a different order of magnitude: ours for 16 to 40 people comes to about 141 pages, and most of that is badges and drop-in cards.
Ink, honestly
Print cost is the single most common complaint about printable games and almost nobody talks about it in the listing. Three things help, in order of how much they save:
- Use the low-ink edition if there is one. A real low-ink edition is not a greyscale export: it is the same words and the same layout with the fills, backgrounds and borders removed, black on white. It is the cheapest page a home printer can make.
- Do not print the decorative pages twice. One copy of the case file is the design intent. Guests are supposed to pass documents around; that is half the social mechanism.
- Cardstock only where it earns it. Character cards and pocket cards, yes. Forty pages of evidence, no.
Cutting
Cut lines should be dotted, thin and grey, and they should be printed on the sheet rather than implied. If you are cutting more than a dozen cards, a craft knife and a metal ruler on a cutting mat is three times faster than scissors and gives you square corners. Cut all the long edges of the sheet first, then the short ones, so you are never cutting a small piece.
For cards that are printed two or four to a page, cut the page in half first and then trim each card. It sounds slower. It is not, because you stop chasing a drifting line across nine inches.
If the game gives you a large-print edition of the cards at A5, cut nothing: those are one per page and you fold them, which is a genuinely better experience for anyone over about sixty.
The test that costs one sheet of paper
This is the whole quality-control procedure we run on our own products before anything ships, and it works just as well the night before a party:
- Print one full case document, in black and white, on the cheapest paper in the house.
- Put it on the table you will use, under the light you will actually have. Candles are dimmer than you remember.
- Photograph it on a phone at arm's length and read it back off the phone. That is a surprisingly good proxy for "a guest with reading glasses in their coat pocket".
- Read it out loud. You will catch anything ambiguous, and you will find out how long a document takes to read, which is what your round timings actually depend on.
If it fails, you have lost one sheet of paper and you still have time to print the large-print or low-ink edition instead.
What good type looks like, so you can judge a game before you buy
Listings rarely say, so here are the numbers we hold ourselves to and which you can check against any preview image:
- Body text no smaller than 12 pt; character cards 13 pt; anything read aloud by a person standing up, 14 pt.
- No text below 10 pt anywhere, including the small print on in-world forms.
- No text over an image, ever. Atmosphere comes from borders and ink colour, never from putting words on a photograph.
- Near-black on white or warm cream, high contrast, and no pale grey body text.
- Handwritten documents carry a printed transcript underneath. The handwriting is charm; the information is not optional.
If a preview image shows a script face used for a paragraph, or a paragraph laid over a picture of a snowy village, you have learned something about the whole product.
Everything we sell ships as plain PDFs in US Letter and A4, with a low-ink edition of every page and a large-print edition of the character cards: The Hour Candle, $29 for 6–12 guests and The Golden Tin, $39 for 16–40. Or print our free four-player mystery first and use it as your print test.
Read next
- How to host a murder mystery dinner party at home
A timetable, a print plan and the five decisions that make the evening work — including how to host a murder mystery party and still play it yourself.
- What goes wrong at murder mystery parties, and how to stop it
Nine failure modes taken from real reviews — the host who cannot play, the answer on page one, type nobody can read, clues that lead nowhere — and the fix for each.
- A free four-player murder mystery you can print tonight
The Wet Half-Hour: a complete free four-player murder mystery. 11 printed documents, 45 minutes, sealed answer in a separate file. No email needed. US Letter and A4 PDF.