🥂 1920s speakeasy · New Year's Eve edition

A Shot in the Dark

Prohibition gin, a hot jazz band, and a countdown to midnight that someone at the party won't live to hear. Dress up, pour something bubbly (or bathtub), and solve it before the ball drops.

8–14 or 8–20 players · Play time about 2 hours (1½–3 hours depending on your room) · Standard 76 printable pages · Full Cast 85 printable pages · Instant download

The setup

New Year's Eve, 1929, in a speakeasy that officially doesn't exist. Bootleggers, flappers, a crooked alderman, and a club owner who knows everybody's secrets — until the New Year toast, when he raises his own decanter and collapses, poisoned. Then the secrets start spilling. Three rounds of clues and reveals later, your guests will have everything they need to name the killer — no guessing required — because this kit was cold-solved twice and adversarially tested before it was allowed on sale. Made for New Year's Eve — and a natural fit for birthdays and Gatsby nights all year round.

About the title: one shot, poured at midnight, in a dark passage — nobody is shot; the shot is the drink.

What's inside (76 pages Standard · 85 pages Full Cast)

Host guide

Setup checklist, running timeline, casting guide, and spoiler-safe instructions — the host can play a character too.

Character booklets

One per character: background, secrets, costume hints (flapper dresses and fedoras encouraged, not required), per-round objectives, and scripted reveals.

3-round clue system

Searchable/physical clues plus character-revealed clues, mapped on a clue matrix so the culprit is uniquely determined.

Party printables

Invitations, name cards, suspect/evidence board, awards certificates (best detective, best dressed, best performance), solution envelope, and the dramatic reveal script.

Choose your edition

EditionPlayersPagesPrice
Standard8–14 players76 pages$39Buy Standard — $39
Full Cast8–20 players85 pages$54Buy Full Cast — $54

Full Cast adds optional expansion characters — if some don't show up, the plot still works; their absence never breaks the mystery. Not sure of your headcount? Full Cast covers every group the Standard does, plus six more.

Cold-solved twice, guaranteed fair. Two independent solvers worked this kit from the clues alone and reached the same culprit, and an adversarial pass tried to convict the strongest innocent and failed — all on the exact text that ships. And if a verified logic error ever surfaces, you get a refund or replacement and the kit is pulled and fixed for every buyer. How delivery and printing work →

Running more than one party? This kit is also in the Complete Collection bundle — all three kits in Full Cast editions for $99. And try the free 6-player mini-mystery, The Locked Study.