Annotated Games: 8 players

This game was played during the game testing of Mingle & Murder. The strategies applied were fairly straight-forward:

• Guests: Steal primarily from rooms. Steal from players if a room of interest has been visited more than 4 times or if the player has 2 items of interest.
• Inspector: Take cards from crowded rooms to maximize the odds of taking a murder card.
• Murderer: Play only 1 Murder card per round. Avoid Inspector's rooms. Prioritize crowded rooms.

The cards drawn are colored red for Murder cards, green for Catch cards and blue for Save cards. lightgray indicates that a room card was drawn.

Setup

The players were given the following objectives:

1. Aunt Agatha: Murderer
2. Inspector Speckle: Find the Murderer
3. Sir Bertram Butterscotch: Cellar, Living room, Cellar or Living room
4. Lady Sophie Sapphire: Library, Living room, Bedroom
5. Chambermaid Cherry Crimson: Cellar, Dining room, Kitchen
6. Gardener Graham Grassleave: Garden, Kitchen, Library
7. Valet Valerian Violet: 3 different rooms
8. Colonel Clemens Clementine: Dining room, Garden, Dining room or Garden

(With 8 players, the Stable and the Trophy room were excluded, thus modifying Sir Bertram's and Colonel Clemens' third objectives to any of the two remaining rooms on their object cards.)

Round 1

Aunt Agatha succeeds in not only avoiding the Inspector and the Doctor but also to leave her murder card in the well visited Cellar. The result is that Chambermaid Cherry Crimson is murdered wich, given that she also visited the Dining room and the Kitchen, leaves all but Lady Sophie Sapphire as suspects. A good start for her indeed.

Inspector Speckle only managed to catch two stealing Guests. Sir Bertram Butterscotch didn't find any Room card anyway but Gardener Graham Grassleave found two Room cards and had to return one so no Guest has more than one Room card.

Will the game be won by Aunt Agatha already in the next round or will the other players manage to stay alive long enough to catch up?

Round 2

Aunt Agatha is effective (and really dislikes her staff) as the Valet becomes the second victim. She initially considered murdering the Lady but since she was the only Guest visiting the Library and the Bedroom, all traces would lead back to her. Instead, she was fortunate (and Valerian Violet unfortunate) to choose the Kitchen. With the Valet murdered and the Colonel having an alibi (he didn't visit any of the Valet's rooms), Bertram and Graham are still suspects. The victims erratically choose to haunt the poor Gardner and Aunt Agatha claims the victory!

P&P (PDF, A4)	P&P (PDF, US Letter)

Annotated games

• 6 players
• 8 players
• 10 players

If you like those game mechanisms, I can also recommend: