Abby Manor Masquerade Ball: Murder Mystery Party Game

We had a great time getting into character and trying to solve the mystery.

Haven’t played yet so all I can say to date is

I bought this pack for my 24th birthday party and it was a hit! I was glad you could download it right away because I only planned a week ahead. The instructions were easy to follow. I bought the expansion pack. We had about 25 players. Everyone had a blast! Good for all ages. The masquerade theme was so fun because everyone dressed the part! I would highly recommend this party.

It is easy to follow along with your character most in the mystery were new and it went very well!! Only down side is the amount of printing that is required! I had purchased another one that allowed you to send PDF to your guests so they did not need to print all of the paper work! I like that it was more environmentally friendly! Otherwise a great time and lots of fun to play!!

This was our first murder mystery party. We planned on having the minimum but ended up having 16. I was able to assemble everything without ruining the surprise for myself (a participant in the game). I reviewed the rules many times and, having done a lot of board and social games, was pretty confident going into it. We had a mix of people extremely committed to their characters and others not sure what to do exactly. I wish there was more backstory and info about the character informing you 'how to play' them. Despite there being a paragraph or so for each character, you are sort of left to make up character quirks and conversation pieces. An interesting example of this is the 'pregame' conversation prompts. 80% of the things you are texting people - they have no idea how to respond to. At this point in the story you likely don't know how to play your character or what to say in response. That's the weird thing, you don't really have to respond. What people are saying to you is informing you about your own character.
A couple points that stood out for improvement... Round 2 cards have prompts for more conversation/actions AS WELL AS, your clues for 'post-murder'. This feels strange, you're essentially telling the guests 'read the top portion, ignore the post-murder bit until 15min in when the murder victim reveals themselves'. Also, It didn't happen to be emphasized enough in our group that we really ought to read the 'victim placard' very closely. Otherwise the clues about 'minutes' (how long ago the murder happened), don't make a lot of sense. Even, on it's own a clue about 'the murder happening 20 minutes ago' while the round is lasting 40 minutes, feels confusing.
The biggest issue we had was with Round 3. We went through 6 characters or so 'solution' cards, then, all of the sudden, it was over - the murderer had confessed and many people never read. The reason some people got skipped was because of the confusingly worded Round 3 cards.
The cards read like this: Character Name, Script, This person reads next (large name) unless these people have not read (small names).
This means its very easy to just read the next large name and ignore the smaller names which should be going first, even though they are small and at the bottom.
What is happening here is that there are several 'primary' characters reading their cards, then it cycles through all the options characters, then back to a chain of core characters. This system of 'your card will instruct the next person to read' relies on multiple people reading their whole card before they tell the next person to read. It's much more likely they will just read the big name at the bottom.. The font and text size makes it very easy to ignore the optional characters. This leaves you with a fairly anticlimactic ending where less than half the room had read their solutions.
This could be easily resolved by 1) the host using the answer key in the end as it lists out the reading order - but the rules very clearly told me not to if I didn't want it spoiled. 2) The card could just list it in the appropriate order, it would instead be in the order: Character Name, Script, The next (optional) character here reads next... , If they are all completed this character reads (primary character).
Regardless, everyone had a very good time. We will definitely do another