SUMMARY
Victorian eccentric, Capability Bazalgette, has gone up in his hot air balloon. And up. And up. As he floats away from the jurisdiction of Isaac Newton and prematurely enters the afterlife, who is responsible for this tragedy and what was their cruel motive?
CONCEPT
Parlour games… aren’t great. They were popularised in Victorian households as a way of passing time during long candle-lit evenings. Entertainment has come a long way since then. The challenge we posed ourselves was somehow to turn the most insipid of parlour games, Consequences, into something meaningful and, well, consequential.
PLANNING
Fresh off the success of our first Murder Mystery adventure, we were teeming with ideas. We had already paid homage to the genre and now had come the time for subversion. The key feeling we wanted to evoke was that the evening was unfolding beyond our control. A superficial Victorian whodunnit was to be a foil for something modern and macabre. The entry-point for this sense of unease would be via Puzzle’s second-cousin: Magic. And so the planning sessions began to converge upon ways to choreograph spooky coincidence and synchronicity.
ADVENTURE
Some adventures benefit from allowing characters to play themselves, as it were. Puzzle teams can forge over natural alliances that supervene the narrative thread. In this case, there were three distinct groups attending, so we feared that natural alliances may end up ostracising groups or restricting the flow of information. To mitigate this, detailed Character Sheets were sent to each adventurer months before the date.
We began the evening with ice-breaking rounds of Consequences. Paper was folded, passed clockwise, and populated blindly. After twenty minutes of cheerful absurdity, the cards were dropped into a wicker basket in the centre of the room and apparently forgotten.
They were not forgotten.
The First Act followed a traditional Murder Mystery narrative: the adventurers had been summoned to a country house by a detective, Colonel Custard, who suspected we all knew something about the tragic demise of eccentric balloonist, Capability Bazalgette, the previous night.
Accusations flew, histrionics ensued, alibis were shattered. The adventurers were in the full swing of the narrative.
This was the perfect time for the rug-pull we had been preparing. A sudden powercut was followed by two masked men appearing in white jumpsuits, delivering a few puzzle pieces and a note.
A final video of Colonel Custard suddenly came on, explaining the whole previous Act had been a ruse. In truth, everyone had been summoned here by Mister Walter, in order to punish their complicity in a previous Murder Mystery on the location several years earlier. They would have to demonstrate their right to survive as viewed through the (natural) lens of puzzle solving ability.
The following two hours consisted of several treasure hunts, escape rooms, and narrative puzzles. Correct solutions were rewarded with more puzzle pieces from the masked men. A lot of the aesthetic of these puzzles gestured to Squid Games which was very much the 2021 Zeitgeist.
Here are some out-of-context puzzles:
A new video revealed that Mister Walter was unimpressed with their progress and had decided to terminate the experiment by leaking a deadly neurotoxin through the vents of the house. Like all fictional neurotoxins, there must be an antidote somewhere…
Just as the adventurers were recovering from this revelation, the treasure hunt concluded, revealing the final jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Finally, the puzzle resolved to a floorplan of the house, highlighting a specific location in a wardrobe upstairs.
The adventurers quickly recovered Mister Walter’s laptop, but—alas—his account was password protected! A few failed guesses triggered the hint:
ざ6, ぜ3, な12, ふ5, ほ2, も1
Where had we seen these hiragana characters before?
One eagle-eyed adventurer recalled that each Consequence Card earlier had a Japanese character at the top. No one had paid much attention to it at the time. But they were still in the room, untouched, cast aside in their wicker basket.
Taking the first one as an example, ざ6 resolved to the word that someone had written in the sixth space on the Card marked ざ. As above:
Owing to the time pressure and nervous energy of the Consequences game, we had banked on some of these seemingly free choices actually being forced. For example, [6 — adverb] could only realistically ever be “First”.
Continuing with the other characters resolved to the sequence of words:
First – Letter – First – Name – Calendar – Order
Could we really rely on adventurers freely inputting the word “Calendar” into a Consequence Card to lie on the critical path for the final puzzle? Of course not! Remember, we ourselves were playing Consequences alongside the adventurers, so had carefully positioned ourselves so that we would receive the correct card for those particular sections at the right time in the sequence. Even with this failsafe, it was an extremely satisfying moment when the adventurers realised they had ostensibly written out the next clue entirely on their own volition. But what did this mean?
There was a single piece of information that had so far been entirely unused throughout the evening. It had been available to every character for months. Yes, the names and birthdays on the Character Cards. This is why it is so important to restrain from providing unnecessary detail: it is crucial that adventurers subscribe to the idea that everything will pay off at some point.
The adventurers were quick to place themselves in date order and shout out the first letter of their first names. This extracted the phrase:
PASSWORD IS VALIUM
Rushing back to the laptop, the adventurers were finally able to log in and order themselves the anecdote to the frontdoor. Within seconds, the doorbell rang (courtesy of a remotely triggered switch), revealing a hamper labelled “Antidote”. Of course it was full of wine to double up as a celebration for thwarting Jevan’s villainy once again. I never ceased to be amazed how quickly it is possible to forget about acute neurotoxin poisoning after half a glass of Chablis.
AFTERMATH
What made the evening work was not the spectacle, but the delayed realisation that the innocuous parlour game at the beginning had been the structural backbone all along. The players had written the solution themselves, apparently by accident.
We learned something important that night: give people ingredients, not instructions. Provide structure, hidden constraints, and a world that holds together, and they will supply the drama.
The parlour game was no longer insipid. It had consequences.