Murder on the Empire Builder

Imagine it is the year 1898 and you have just invested a considerable amount of money into building a new passenger train, plus several new stations along The Great Northern Railway, the northernmost transcontinental railroad in the United States, which runs from Saint Paul, MN all the way to Seattle, WA. As thanks for your generous investment, you are invited to ride along on the passenger train's maiden voyage.

But wait! What's this? A famous detective has borded the train following allegations that a murder has taken place! Can you help the detective on his mission, and thereby clear your name?

This was the premise for my completely original (yes! Original) Murder Mystery party that I hosted for Halloween this year. I say murder mystery, but it was closer to an escape room—no one was expected to be in character. It took a considerable amount of planning, but with the help of my lovely partner, the result was a blast! I actually planned a similar event two Halloweens ago (unfortunately no pictures were taken—darn!). There were a lot of kinks that I worked out from the last one, while simultaneously introducing new ones. So it goes.

On my previous attempt, everyone was expected to solve the same linear clue path while working in teams of two or three. Even though I tried to plan in redundancy or digitization of clues, as you might have guessed, people still walked away with things they shouldn't have, or spoiled certain puzzles for other teams. This was bad game design on my part.

So this time around, I endeavored to create 4 different clue paths. Each team was given their own train ticket, with a unique combination that corresponded to a single lock. I took a page out of Clue's book and made the final clue of each track a different element of the crime. In this case they were: the Murderer, Murder Weapon, the Victim/Motive, and the Murderer's current location. When a team discovered one, I would send them to the beginning of the next track. This led to very little overlap between what each team was doing.

The theme was decided on because first of all, murder on a train? That's a classic a la Poirot. Second of all, I had just gone on a tour of the Seattle Underground, and I was all psyched to play with some local history. That's how I ended up setting it around the time of the Yukon Gold Rush, which was one of the main reasons Seattle became a major port city. I kind of regret not using ill-begotten gold as motivation for the murder? That was a major missed opportunity on my part. Instead I made it about a fictional former member of Coxey's Army being murdered by the railway's owner because of a wage dispute. Yeah...I'm not sure either. I think I wanted the villain to be a multi-millionaire who was picking on the little guy. You know—like real life.

Some of my favorite puzzles included:

1. turning on a kettle whose steam would fog up a mirror. Written on the mirror in RainX was the location of the next clue. (I got this one from the r/ConstructedAdventures)
2. Using a train whistle to sound out morse code, which revealed the station where the murderer got off the train.
3. Requiring the use of binoculars to find a fake bird hidden in a bush. Under it was a page number that would lead them to "identify" it in a book. (Did I mention the murderer is an avid bird watcher?)

Some hiccups I ran into: people just finding clues without ever discovering the preceding clue that should have led them to it. For example, I had some blocks of ice with "gold" frozen in it. Some people just happened to see it tucked away in the freezer without being sent there by the famous newspaper article about the Yukon Gold Rush. Do you know how many hours I sunk into making a legible version of that newspaper? The answer is: way too many for you to just straight up ignore it. Come on guys! I even wrote some fake articles—your loss since you didn't get any of that juicy lore.

Honestly, there were way too many elements to write about in full detail, so instead, I made a little slide show about it. Enjoy!