It felt like renting the coolest tape in the store and ending up inside the movie.Game night host
Est. 1987
About
Back Wall Games makes party games packaged as video rentals that never existed.
Where this came from
Somebody wanted to throw a murder mystery party and could not find a kit where the organiser got to take part. Every box on the shelf needed a narrator. That looked like a solvable problem rather than a rule.
The VHS thing came later and then took over. It turns out a mystery is easier to sell to a room when it arrives looking like a film nobody has seen.
What we hold to
The host plays too
The person who organised the night should not have to spend it pretending not to know the ending. The app deals the secrets and runs the clock so nobody has to sit outside the game.
The box does not know the ending
The culprit is picked when the party starts, and the evidence is written so that several different endings all hold up. Play the same box twice and you get a different murderer and a different set of clues.
Nothing gets solved for you
Evidence is tracked on paper, by you. The app will not cross-reference anything or tell you who is lying. It hands out information and then gets out of the way.
It should look like something
A murder mystery night is already a piece of theatre and the props should earn their place on the table. Every card, pass and clipping is made to be handled, not just read.
Not only murder
The shelf is going to hold more than mysteries. The same engine underneath handles anything built out of gated reveals and information nobody has all of, which covers card games, cold cases and boxes you open one envelope at a time.
All of it arrives in the same shape. A rental store carried every genre and they all sat on the same shelf in the same case.