Murder mystery games for adults come in five formats, and the right one depends mostly on how many people you have and whether anyone wants to host. For two to four people who want a quiet puzzle, an evidence box. For eight to twenty with costumes and a willing host, a printable kit. For a team event with a budget, a hosted show. For four to six friends tonight with nobody preparing anything, a no-host app. Below: how many people each one takes, how much work it is, what it costs and where it breaks.
Prices and player counts are the ones each company listed on its own site in September 2026.
Evidence boxes
Hunt A Killer is the one most people have heard of. You open a box of documents, photographs and locked tins, and the group works out who did it from the evidence. Nobody plays a character; everyone is a detective.
- Players: one to six, depending on the case.
- Prep: none. You open the box.
- Price: $29.99 for most standalone cases. The longest, The Bugman, is $99.99.
- Length: from under an hour to a whole afternoon; The Bugman runs four to six hours.
- Where it breaks: it is a puzzle, so the evening is quiet. With six people around one set of documents, whoever is not holding a page drifts. It suits two to four people who like escape rooms more than it suits a party.
Printable host kits
The classic format. You buy a kit from a company like Masters of Mystery or Night of Mystery, download it, and print a booklet for every guest with their character, secrets and motives.
- Players: four to twenty, and some titles stretch to thirty with an expansion. Night of Mystery kits typically start at eight guests.
- Prep: real work. You print the booklets, and with some kits you send each guest their character in advance so they can plan a costume. Allow an evening for it.
- Price: about $35 for a download at Night of Mystery; a boxed kit costs more.
- Length: an hour and a half to three hours.
- Where it breaks: the printer the night before, and the guest who never read their booklet. Kits differ on the host. In Night of Mystery's the host runs the game rather than playing a character; Masters of Mystery writes the host a character and picks the murderer at random once the game starts, so the host gets to play too.
For a big group that wants costumes and a proper night of theatre, this is still the format to beat.
AI-written mysteries
A newer option. You answer a few questions about your group, and a site like Crime & Dine or Mystery Shaper generates a story, a dossier for each player and a host guide, usually as PDFs.
- Players: four to ten on most of them.
- Prep: about as much as a printable kit. The writing takes minutes, and then the dossiers still have to reach each guest.
- Price: from €2.99 per player at Crime & Dine to about $26 to $34 for a whole kit at Mystery Shaper.
- Length: depends on the plot it writes.
- Where it breaks: nobody has played the mystery before you. Whether the clues really lead to one answer depends on the model, and the table finds out at the reveal. The option to put your friends' real names and inside jokes into the plot is fun on paper, but a mystery set in your own world tends to turn accusations personal, which is one reason written mysteries tend to be set on trains and in villas.
Hosted shows
A company sends professional actors, in person or on a video call, who run the whole evening. The Murder Mystery Co., for example, runs its virtual parties over Zoom.
- Players: eight to twelve for The Murder Mystery Co.'s games, which have eight suspect roles and bystander roles past eight. Many companies take much larger groups.
- Prep: book a date and send the link. The actors do the rest.
- Price: charged per person and usually quoted on request, so it depends on your group size.
- Length: around two hours.
- Where it breaks: a fixed time slot, and a price that grows with every guest. It works well as a team event and less well as a spontaneous Friday.
No-host apps
The phone takes the host's job: it deals the characters, delivers each person's private information, and moves the evening forward. Guilty Party is ours, so read this entry knowing that.
- Players: four to six. Two of the cases are written for exactly four.
- Prep: none. One person opens a case on their phone, and everyone else scans a QR code and plays in the browser, with nothing to install.
- Price: the first case, The Eclipse, is free. The others are $4.99 each, or $29.99 a year for all of them, and only the host pays.
- Length: about half an hour of game, and usually another half hour of arguing about it.
- Where it breaks: six seats is the ceiling, so it doesn't work for a big party. Everyone needs a phone and a connection. A case plays once per group, like an episode. And it is a talking game rather than a deduction puzzle: some evenings end with nobody caught, and the app does not name the culprit afterwards.
Which one to pick
Two to four people who like puzzles: an evidence box. It is the only format here that works for two.
Four to six friends, nobody wants to prepare anything: a no-host app. The zero-prep guide walks through an evening that starts from a decision made ten minutes earlier.
Eight to twenty people, costumes, one person happy to organise: a printable kit. Nothing on a phone scales to a room that size, and the theatre of a big costumed dinner is the point.
A work event or a remote team with a budget: a hosted show. Paying actors is what makes it work for people who have never met.
A party where most guests want to mingle, not sit down: none of the above. Hidden Agenda, from the same studio as Guilty Party, gives every guest three secret missions to pull off mid-conversation and plays free in the browser. It has no plot and no reveal to argue about, but it runs underneath the party instead of stopping it.