Poe's Raven Party: Gothic Murder Mystery Party Game

My group of friends deeply enjoyed this game. It kept everyone guessing with an unexpected plot twist!

My Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, Knives Out loving 15yo son chose this mystery for his 15th birthday party with a co-ed group of kids, ages 12-17. The kids were friends from 3 different places, and one of them didn't know anyone else. My husband and I were nervous and hopeful that forcing them to socialize with a purpose would lead to a fun party, and it did. My son is already planning on having another murder mystery next year, and his younger brother wants to throw one for his birthday in the summer.

During the final round, the kids were discussing and changing their responses in a very cooperative fashion, so 8/12 got it right. If you have a more competitive group, your number of correct answers will probably be lower.

I don't have any complaints. The setup took maybe an hour or so for reading, printing, cutting, and prepping envelopes. We did minimal decorations (black tablecloths, some skulls, candles, cobwebs, and black gauze--all repurposed or bought on post-Halloween clearance), non-themed food, and clothing we had on hand. We played the Knives Out and Glass Onion soundtracks in the background, which the kids mentioned added to the mood. It was very affordable, easy to host, and so much fun. Highly recommend!

I wanted to do something different for my birthday this year and My Mystery Party most certainly delivered! My theme was death to my 20's and adding the murder mystery on to this was perfect!
The pack you receive explains everything clearly, gave me the flexibility to design my information pack the way I wanted and the plot twist was very unexpected!
I would purchase again, i might do one for xmas this year too because we had so much fun!!!

Was so much fun with both 1920s we had to try another mystery

I hosted this game for my 30th birthday. Overall it was fun, and I don't regret the choice. As it was not the only event of the day, we played the shortest version: no pre-games, no money challenge, no bonus games. For almost all the guests this was their first murder mystery.

What we loved:
1. The host can play the game. I did ask my non-playing friends to help cut the clues and put them into envelopes, but it was straight-forward after that. The instructions are clear and detailed, and the example timeline is very helpful. The only spoiler is who is required: but you can avoid it, if you ask your non-playing friends to pick which optional characters will be dropped.
2. All the gossip. Average people aren't great actors, but the talking points provided to the characters made it easy to act your role, talk to others, stir drama, and all that fun stuff. It also makes you excited to hear the solutions and how it all ties together, even if you don't get the answer right.
3. The victims die in the game, not off-screen, which is definitely more exciting.
4. The game mechanics: the game is non-cooperative (everyone gets a guess at the murderer), the murderer doesn't know who they are, and the guests are supposed to mingle in 1-1 conversations. This creates a smooth flow of information and a good balance between sharing others' secrets, but keeping some of your ideas to yourself.
5. Awesome and fast customer service, very helpful recommendations!

What we didn't love that much:
1. The reveal. About 25% of our group guessed the murderer. However, the motive seemed a bit thin, and the way the murder was committed - a bit random, compared to some of the versions the players made up during the accusation round.
2. The evidence. The forensic report was quite short and simply listed some names of guests linked to parts of the crime scene. There were no middle steps to figure out, f.ex. who could have left a particular trace. The separation of the game space into 2 rooms didn't have much effect on the game either.
3. Information incompleteness. Several times in the game we've encountered that character A knows a fact about character B, but character B doesn't know it about themselves. That can make it hard to react to things: you don't know if something is a false rumor that you should contemptuously deny, or if it just wasn't mentioned on your clue card.
4. Optional characters. Why, oh why is the guest list sorted according to optionality? I shuffled it to be alphabetical instead, so it was less obvious. But still, in the first round many guests caught on to who was optional: those charaters had a lot fewer details and less stuff to discuss.
5. The aesthetics. Parts of the game have great design choices: the guest list, name badges, the victim sign and the pinterest board are very nice. We didn't decorate much, but the game atmosphere allowed for some beautiful decoration options. However, the introduction video and the rule video, made of assorted mismatching stock video clips, mediocre animation, and amateur voiceover, were a lot less impressive and took you out of the mood; so did the weirdly sexualized pictures from a custome shop, embedded in the pre-game webpage. I also had to rewrite the guest list a little to make the descriptions easier to read and less over the top, but mostly because we're not native English speakers.