Good questions
Printing, player counts, hosting, delivery, and the guarantee — everything a host asks before the party.
Checkout is handled by Stripe. The moment your payment clears, our system emails you a personal download link — within seconds, not days. The link is licensed to the email address you checked out with, and the same email includes a link to your personalized license sheet (your email and order ID). You can re-download your kit from that link if you lose the file or need a fresh copy for a reprint — re-downloads are allowed, so keep the email. Print as many copies of the player materials as your group needs for your party. Buying the Complete Collection bundle? It's the same single email, carrying all three kits — a download link and a license-sheet link for each one.
Check spam/promotions first — it comes from our delivery system right after checkout. Still nothing? Reply to your Stripe receipt or contact support from the email you checked out with, and we'll re-send your link manually. Every purchase is recorded in our delivery ledger precisely so a missed email is a two-minute fix, not a lost order.
Murder at the Mistletoe Gala is 66 pages in Standard and 73 pages in Full Cast, but you don't print all of it for every guest: the host guide once, one character booklet per player, plus the shared clue and party printables. The kits are deliberately designed ink-light and black-and-white friendly — no full-bleed backgrounds or photo-heavy pages — because "the kit cost me $20 in ink" is a known complaint with other sellers, and we designed against it. A standard home printer handles it fine; the host guide lists exactly what to print for your player count.
Every kit comes in the same two editions: Standard ($39) covers up to 14 players. Full Cast ($54) covers up to 20, adding optional expansion characters. If your guest list might grow, choose Full Cast: it plays exactly like Standard with fewer characters, and the extra characters can be dropped without breaking the plot — their absence never breaks the mystery. Fewer than the minimum? Each kit's host guide gives its minimum cast, and the story is tested at minimum cast before sale.
Yes. The host guide is spoiler-safe: setup instructions are separated from anything that reveals the solution, and the solution itself stays sealed in the solution envelope until the reveal. The host takes a character and investigates alongside everyone else. (Every kit is also tested with a host-as-player run before it goes on sale.)
Plan on 1.5–3 hours depending on group size and how theatrical your guests get. A free mini-mystery, The Locked Study (about 20 minutes for 6 players), is coming soon — a good way to learn the format.
That's the quality bar this store exists on. Before sale, every kit passes a logic matrix check (the clues uniquely determine one culprit, red herrings are deliberate, nothing contradicts), two independent cold-solve passes (two solvers work from the clues alone and must reach the same culprit), an adversarial pass that tries to convict the strongest innocent, a character-balance pass, and minimum-cast and host-as-player runs. If a kit fails, it doesn't ship. All three kits in this store — the Mistletoe Gala, A Shot in the Dark, and Murder at the Reunion — have passed all of it, on the exact text that ships.
These are digital downloads, so sales are final — with the defective-kit guarantee: if any kit contains a verified logic error, the buyer who reports it receives a refund or a replacement, and the kit is pulled and fixed for every buyer. A mystery that can't be solved fairly is a defect, and defects are on us. Changed-your-mind and bought-the-wrong-edition cases aren't covered by the guarantee, but if you bought the wrong edition before your party, contact support — we'd rather swap you to the right one than ruin your night.
Yes — your license covers your own parties. Reprint and replay with a new group as often as you like, and re-download from your delivery email link whenever you need a fresh file. Please don't share the files publicly or resell them; the license is how a small store like this one stays in business.
All three are on sale now: Murder at the Mistletoe Gala for Christmas and office parties (no gore, corporate-friendly), A Shot in the Dark for New Year's Eve and 1920s nights, and Murder at the Reunion for reunions and milestone birthdays any time of year. Hosting several parties? The Complete Collection bundle has all three in their Full Cast editions for $99.