CRIME DOSSIER GAME: WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Crime Dossier is a type of murder mystery game, which involves the resolution of a crime through an intriguing process of analysis and deduction.
In a crime dossier game, the players have at their disposal the complete file of a crime, divided into various investigation tracks, containing all the useful elements to solve the mystery they are investigating.
Thereby the difficulty is to link precisely the various clues together in a coherent way. Only by using logical reasoning and lateral thinking it will be possible to reach the solution and frame the culprit.
CRIME DOSSIER GAME: WHAT ARE THE MAIN FEATURES?
Crime Dossier Games, unlike those held by theater companies, have as their central focus the plot, its complexity and the elegance of its resolution.
FIRST PHASE: ANALYSIS OF THE ELEMENTS OF THE CRIME
The clues needed to solve the crime are presented as if they were contained in an actual police file. The story unfolds through testimony, coroner’s reports, evidences found at the crime scene and much more.
Therefore the players have at their disposal a complete investigation dossier containing the elements of the story which provides them with a general picture of what happened.
SECOND PHASE: DEDUCTION AND SOLUTION OF THE MYSTERY
At this point the deductive phase can begin. It is time to reconstruct what happened, to find out who among the suspects committed the crime and how he managed to do it.
The players will have to rebuild the mechanics of crime using only their deductive skills. As in the best tradition of classic thrillers, they have all the clues to sift through and only their “little gray cells” to reason.
CRIME DOSSIER GAME: STRENGTHS
THE VERSATILITY
With a crime dossier game the plot can be set in any historical period or any location. Moreover the story can be inspired by any literary genre (or subgenre), such as detective fiction, American hardboiled, whodunit, police procedural, spy stories and many others.
Since all the clues are always available to the players in the case files, they can reason on the crime in complete tranquillity without the risk of missing some joke, perhaps fundamental, recited by an actor.
The settings can be of any type. However, each detective story must be immersed in an accurate setting whose veracity is also given by the beauty and contextuality of how the clues are sowed into the story.
MULTIMEDIA
The various clues can be displayed in many ways such as, for example, text, images, comics, audio, photos and videos. The criterion for choosing how to provide the clue depends mainly on three factors: the type of clue, the setting and the sub-genre of the crime fiction.
Certainly the accuracy of the context, the aesthetics of the clues and the precision of the mechanics of the crime are the right ingredients for a compelling intellectual challenge.
CRIME DOSSIER GAME: A GAME FOR THOSE WHO TRULY LOVE CRIME STORIES
The Crime Dossier is probably the most satisfying method to play a murder mystery game for those who truly love the intellectual challenges that only in-depth and well-articulated thrillers can provide. In these crime stories there is not too much room for comedy or for the actors’ “skit” since the focus is on the investigation.
Certainly these crime dossier games arouse a great deal of involvement from the players. In fact they can slowly enter the story, discover the characters and eventually can solve the crime… from the comfort of their homes!
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