Hi all. I run a one-person studio in Japan making printable murder mystery party games as PDFs. The eleventh scenario is now up, and it is the biggest one so far.
The Eve, 20:00 — 8 players + 1 host. https://aiqlabs.itch.io/the-eve-2000
The night before a summer festival, the eight people who run it gather. The head of the neighbourhood association is found dead. There is no vote at the end: the eight of you decide, at the same moment, where each of you will stand at tomorrow’s procession, and that is the ending.
If you have only played a boxed “murder mystery dinner party” before, this is a different genre, so it is worth knowing what changes:
The series now runs from 2 players up to 8, including one that is free and one that needs no host at all. Each is standalone, so there is no order to follow.
Free one, if you want to try the format first: https://aiqlabs.itch.io/last-contact-0400
The rest of the series is 30% off right now: /s/199829/japanese-murder-mystery-series-launch-sale
Happy to answer questions about running one of these, especially if you have never hosted before. The host script reads top to bottom and there are no rules to arbitrate and no dice.
On disclosure: these are written with the help of a language model and then edited, structured and checked by a human before release. Every page on itch carries the AI disclosure field.
The last train has gone. There are four hours until the first one. You are the lost property clerk at a station in winter, and your job is to write each handed-in object into the ledger. That is all your job is — and yet every single time, in the margin beside the name of the object, you find you have written something about the person who lost it.
The Night Counter, 01:00 — $5 · PDF, 11 pages · print & play · 1 player, no GM, 45–90 minutes, two d6 and a pen.
How it plays. Roll two dice: one is the shelf, one is the place on it. Read the object. Write down who you think lost it — a line is enough. Then roll again.
The dice end the night, not you. The second time a roll repeats, the owner has come back for it, and you write what they said at the counter. The third time it repeats, the first train is coming and the night is over — whatever turn you are on. Sometimes that is three turns in.
At the end you pick one object nobody claimed and do one of three things with it: shelve it, take it home, or leave it out at the counter where it can be seen from outside. None of the three is correct. Which one you chose is the record of how you ended the night.
Because the order of the rolls changes every time, which objects get claimed and which are left behind changes, and so does the last one. There are 36 objects across six shelves.
Disclosure: the text, the object tables and the structure were written with AI (Claude) and checked by a person before release — this is declared on the project page too. The cover and figures are not generative AI; they are drawn by a program.
It is my first solo game after a run of multiplayer murder mystery scripts, so I would genuinely like to hear where the pacing drags. Happy to send a free copy to anyone who wants to read it and tell me.
First Light, 03:00 is a printable murder mystery for one host and three players. 90–120 minutes, plays online or around a table.
Mount Fuji, the eighth station. Three thousand metres up, three days before the mountain closes for the year. A small hut. Three guests staying the night, and one more.
This is the tenth in a series I have been writing since June. Every title is a place and a time — a printing office at 23:00, a radio studio at 25:00, a polling station at 22:00 — and each one is built for one exact player count, from 2 up to 7.
The reason is boring but real: the hardest part of running a murder mystery at home is not the mystery, it is having exactly the right number of people in the room. Most published games say "3–7 players" on the box and then quietly get worse at both ends. I decided to write a separate game for each number instead.
Three things I learned doing it, in case you are writing one too:
- The 3-player scenarios are by far the hardest. With three suspects you cannot hide the murderer in a crowd, so every piece of misdirection has to come from when something happened rather than from who else it could have been.
- The host's script has to be physically separate from the player booklets. Same PDF, separate files. Otherwise someone scrolls two pages too far and the evening is over.
- One of the ten has no host at all. That needed a completely different structure — the players have to police the information themselves, and the whole thing has to survive someone reading a card out of order.
Disclosure: I write these with an AI language model and edit them by hand. The AI disclosure fields on every itch page are set accordingly.
https://aiqlabs.itch.io/first-light-0300
