Printing Your Murder Mystery Kit at Home

Open the files before you print anything. A typical kit contains a host guide of eight to twenty pages, one character sheet per player running one or two pages each, a set of clue documents, and usually extras such as invitations, name badges and costume notes. Some kits split these into separate PDFs and some deliver one combined file with a contents page. Either way, spend five minutes identifying which pages belong to which group, because the print job is not one job but four: host material, character sheets, clues, and optional extras. Each has different requirements. A complete kit for eight to twelve players usually lands somewhere between forty and sixty pages in total, which is a normal home printing session and not a commercial job. Kits run from 39 to 59 dollars and the price covers the whole group, so printing is the only recurring cost you have.

Standard 20 lb copy paper is perfectly fine for the host guide and for character sheets. Those pages are read once, folded, and stuffed in a pocket, so spending money on them is wasted. Clues are the exception. Anything a guest will pick up, pass around and examine benefits from heavier stock, and 32 lb paper or a light card at 65 lb makes a letter or a telegram feel like an object rather than a printout. If you are buying one thing, buy a small pack of heavier paper for clues only. Cream or ivory paper suits period settings and costs almost nothing extra. Avoid glossy photo paper for text documents, since it reflects lamplight badly in a dim room and looks modern in a way that fights every historical theme. If you have no special paper at all, print clues normally and age them by hand, which the next section covers.

Color ink is the expensive part of home printing, so spend it deliberately. Character sheets are almost always text with a header graphic and print perfectly in grayscale, which is where most of your pages are. The host guide is also fine in black and white. Put your color where a guest will look closely: photographs, newspaper front pages, painted portraits, maps, anything with a stamp or a seal, and the invitations if you are printing those. As a rule of thumb, a kit for ten players needs color on roughly six to ten pages out of fifty. Set the whole job to grayscale first, print it, then go back and print those specific pages in color. Doing it in that order rather than the reverse is the single biggest ink saving available. If your color cartridge is nearly empty, grayscale everything and nobody at the table will comment. Check your cartridge level before you start, because a color run that dies halfway leaves you with two documents that do not match.

Set the PDF to print at actual size or 100 percent, never fit to page, because scaling shrinks documents designed to fill a sheet and puts uneven white borders around clues. Turn off any borderless option unless your printer genuinely supports it. Print single sided for everything. This matters most for character sheets, where a two-sided print means a guest can flip a page and read someone else's information, and it matters absolutely for the host guide, since you do not want the solution on the back of a page you hand out. Choose normal or high quality for clues and draft for the host guide, which only you will read. Print one test page before committing to the full run, ideally a page with a graphic, and check margins and darkness on it. Two minutes of testing catches the cut-off header that would otherwise appear on every one of your fifty pages.

If you do not own a printer, any print shop will handle the job from a USB drive or an emailed file, and most online services take an uploaded PDF. Expect to pay a few cents per black and white page and considerably more per color page, which usually totals under fifteen dollars for a full kit. Ask for single sided printing explicitly, because shops default to double sided to save paper and that default will ruin your character sheets. Split your order into two jobs, grayscale and color, using the page numbers you identified earlier. Do this at least three days before the party, not on the afternoon of, since shop queues and machine problems are real. If you are printing the compact /detective-case-files format instead, which is a document based investigation for one or two players at 39 dollars, the page count is smaller but the color pages matter more, since the documents themselves are the entire game.

Printing is half the work. Sorting is what stops the night from stalling. Get a pack of plain envelopes and write one character name on each. Into each envelope goes that character's sheet and anything they are meant to start with, nothing else. Clues that you release during the game go into a separate stack, in release order, with a sticky note on each marking which round it belongs to. Keep the host guide out of every envelope and in your own hands. Many hosts add a second small envelope per character marked open in round two, which is a clean way to handle timed information without you having to remember it. Do this sorting the day before, on a table, with the host guide open in front of you. Doing it while guests arrive is the classic way a well-prepared party turns chaotic in the first ten minutes. Number the envelopes in seating order as well, so laying out the table takes a minute rather than ten.

If you want clue documents to look old, the cheap method is real: brush cold tea or coffee over the printed page, blot it, and let it dry flat for an hour. Tear one edge slightly. Do this only on clues, never on character sheets, and test one page first because heavy ink coverage can run. Burn nothing indoors. As for duplicates, print a second copy of any clue the group will want to examine simultaneously, such as a map or a floor plan, so two conversations can happen at once. Print a spare blank sheet of small slips for the written accusations at the end. And print one extra full character sheet for whichever role your kit marks as optional, so a surprise guest can join without a scramble. Keep the whole printed set in one labeled folder afterward, since kits are reusable with a different group and reprinting a full set twice is pure waste. Preparation details live on /printable-murder-mystery-kit.