Topsy-Turvy Land: Tween Mystery Party Game

The kids all had a great time role playing and solving the mystery. A couple of adults assisted the kids who were 6 and 8. However the 12 and 13 year olds were able to play on their own.

Overall, our Mystery Party was a good time. Our group included several families with a variety of ages from 8-14 years old, and the Alice in Wonderland theme was able to appeal to all of them. The solution was apparent to some, but not all of the participants, which means that it was a good mystery-- apparent, but not obvious. About one third of the kids were able to guess "whodunnit" correctly, and not just the oldest ones. I really appreciated that it was a mystery but not a murder.

I did like that it was very easy to host the party. The kit was complete and "fool-proof," which is great for the host. It did not take very long to assemble the envelopes and figure out what I needed to do. I had never done a party like this before, but I can honestly say it was very straightforward. The only "negative" in the kit is that some characters were denoted "either" gender when assigning them, but then were referred to either "he" or "she" on the character cards, which did not always line up with how we assigned the character. (Example: we placed the White Bunny as a boy, but the White Bunny was a "she" on some of the printouts.) That was confusing/undesirable for some of the kids. The PDF was not editable, so we just rolled with it, but it would have been nice to be able to fix that. Truly, though, not the end of the world. Just be aware if you have a kid who is going to get hung up on that.

In general, it is good to know that it took a while for the kids to get the hang of the party. None of them had done a mystery party before, so they were pretty confused during Round 1. When the party was over, one kid said to me that she wished there was some kind of dress rehearsal so they could start to figure it out before the party started. You could tell that it finally "clicked" for a lot of them after Round 2, but at that point, we were nearly done. For anyone else doing the party in the future, it might be worth starting the party with some kind of role-playing game to help facilitate the character development. Perhaps play a game of charades (or similar activity) where the kids have to stay in character or work in their clues. Even the older kids struggled with the "mingle" concept in Round 1. I started to feed them questions to ask others after a while, and that helped.

The only real flaw of the game is that it gives the kids the clues all at once-- there are two clues given at the same time in Round 1, and there are four clues dispersed simultaneously in Round 2. It seemed silly to hand them four envelopes all at the same time. One clue in particular during Round 2 indicates the location of the missing pocket watch, so it didn't make sense to do it all at once. I ended up doing a sort of "escape room" idea where the kids had to complete some kind of task in order to earn their next clue. This worked out really well and helped them have a great time, as well as adding to the mystery. However, it was a reasonable amount of work for me to think up the tasks and then gather the supplies. It would have been nice to have that already thought out for me so that all I had to do was execute a given plan. (For others who may do this party and looking for ideas: The extra clue in Round 1 was taped to the bottom of chair, and the kids were given an ambiguous clue with Clue #1 to look for it. For other tasks in Round 2, we tried to loosely keep with the "Alice in Wonderland" theme. The kids had to use flamingo-shaped pens and craft pom "hedgehogs" to go through a tabletop croquet course to earn another clue. One task was to build a structure from playing cards. Another time they had to use random keys that they found during the scavenger hunt and match them to locked padlocks to unlock pieces of their clues. I had each task in a different room of the house, so they had to figure out where the "Croquet Grounds," "Rose Garden," and "Rabbit Hole" were.) Had I done the party as prescribed with all the clues at once, I don't know that they would have found it as enjoyable. If they got all the clues at once, the party would have been over very quickly.

Overall, though, they enjoyed the mystery party. All the kids said that they had fun and would do it again. I enjoyed it enough that I'm interested in trying to do a party with adults. I would recommend!

As with any mystery party, it’s best if participants get into character. Ours did! 3 generations. 6 adults and 6 kids ages 5-11. S 1 adult was paired with 1 kid to help read clue cards and share and note key information.
Some kids were definitely too young but it didn’t matter because they were part of the fun and enjoyed being in costume.
We started with a a parade around the house and when we entered the front door we had to crawl through a tunnel (card tables covered with blankets), and when we emerged we were in topsy turvy land.
The tea party was great.
The forensics portion was very important to making everyone feel party of solving the mystery.

Kids had a blast dressing up. They were as young as 7 and as old as 13. They were all having a blast.

The kids had a wonderful time dressing up and playing. They were ages 9-11, and it they had no problems with the clues and enjoyed working together to figure out who stole the watch. I had some trouble making the party run smooth, transitioning from one round to the next. The tea party table was out main focus, so round one was the tea party, round two was dinner, and round three was cake so resetting the table for each course was ...but that was poor planning on my part. The instructions were very helpful and took me step by step through the ENTIRE party. All in all the party was a success.