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When you host a murder mystery there are three key items to consider: theme, location and interaction. This article explores the things to consider when creating your own murder mystery party. Theme While many things like the numbers of people attending and the food are important, it all starts with the theme. Are you looking [...]

While writing my recent article what defines a game, I realized that the Agile Development process had many similarities to a game as I had defined it. I worked in software development for over fifteen years, and for the last five was working in an agile team. This is a particular development methodology with a […]

Gameful thinking is about analyzing processes and problems in terms of a game. It doesn’t mean everything is a game, but as Jane McGonigal shows in ‘SuperBetter‘, using gameplay can make you more resilient, more able to meet your goals, and more able to stay motivated. And if works for individuals, it can also work […]

Murder Mystery Victoria and Beyond We have run Murder Mystery Nights in Victoria and across Vancouver Island over the last four years. We’ve done small groups events for private clients and larger scale events for companies, restaurants and hotels. Some of the mysteries listed below were written by us, while others were created by partner […]

The Invitation You are at work and receive an email. It is asking you to save the date for a 1920's themed celebration. The invite is in the art-deco style, not saying much, but hinting that there will be more revealed. And that there will be a good dinner. Beyond that, details are scarce. However, [...]

Conflicts on the stage of your brain ‘Your Brain at Work’ could be relegated to the pile of self-help manuals that promise much, but deliver very little. Then, most self-help books fail the reader because the book is only one small step in actually getting results. The work has to come from the individual, and […]

When I was about eight years old, my grandparents had a big book of party games on their shelf. I used to read it when I visited, but as there was never a big party there, we never played any of the games. Except one. The treasure hunt game. My Granny would set up a [...]

In Part 1, we looked at what we mean by flow. We also looked at how we might get flow in board games; depending on the characteristics of the game. In part 2, we look at some concreate examples of games that can help us reach this useful, highly engaged brain state. Agricola In Agricola, […]

What do we mean by flow? There is a psychological concept called “flow”, first described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (try saying that without speaking Hungarian). Flow is a state of mind where you are highly engaged in a task, and performing that task at your highest level of ability, and have a level of contentment in […]

Back in the UK in 2003 I’ve been running murder mystery parties for about ten years, firstly in London (UK, not Ontario), and now in Victoria (BC, not Australia). It was an occasional thing at first. I started with a kit suggested by my housemate, as we wanted to have something different for our housewarming […]