A puzzle game for clever thinkers with free time and not much else.
There is one riddler and as many detectives as needed. The riddler offers the detectives a premise, usually one sentence long that sets up a murder mystery, knowing the story behind the mystery. The detectives then ask yes or no questions to the riddler, who must answer them truthfully. The riddler may only answer yes or no questions, and may answer with any of the following:
The game is over when the riddler is satisfied that the detectives have sufficiently uncovered all of the essential points of the mystery.
The man is a deep-cover spy for the United States stationed in Russia during The Cold War, 1959. In an accident, he is knocked into a coma while undercover. The man wakes up in a hospital. He is told by his doctor that he is in a military hospital stateside, that the war is over, and that he had been in a coma for three years. A high ranking US Military official debriefs him over the period of two days, the man telling the official all of the details of his undercover operations from his hospital bed. After the debriefing is over, the doctors tell the man he must remain in bed for a few more days. The next morning, he notices something odd - the nurse writes 1959 on her hospital notes. The spy realizes the truth! He had not been in a coma for three years, but a mere three days! Moreover, he was not in the United States, but in Russia, being held captive by Russian Military! Worse of all, he realizes, he "debriefed" with a member of the KGB! he had been conned! Inconsolably ashamed at his treason, the spy jumps out of the fifth flour window of his hospital, dying on impact with a rosebush below.
The man is a airplane robber, and his business associate helps him rob planes. They operate as follows, the dead man rides up in the plane, holds up the passengers, and parachutes out of the plane, onto a landing pad set up by his associate on the ground. They split the money 70-30 in favor of the dead man, because he does the actual robbing. His associate is responsible for setting up lights for landing space at night, and for preparing the getaway. The man was killed by his associate, who was not satisfied with his 30% cut. He set up the landing pad lights underneath some electric wires in the middle of the forest during a nighttime operation, such that his partner in the air would parachute down and hit them. The man dies from electrocution, and is left suspended from the wires by his parachute.
The man is a archaeologist in the 1950s, exploring an Egyptian pyramid. While walking in the depths of the tomb, he steps on a pressure plate, and the floor beneath him falls away. He falls through the trap door, onto stone spikes several stories below. He dies on impact. His murderer is not the mummy, but rather the pyramid architect who designed and helped build the pyramid. This man lived in ancient times, and committed suicide in order to be buried with his king, in the tomb of his own design.
The woman's father held a secret. While the woman thought she was an only child, she had, in fact, a step sister from a Mistress that his father never told her about (her mother was out of the picture). In his will, he stated that his kin should inherit all of his assets when he died. The woman's step-sister found out about her father, and saw an opportunity to claim all the inheritance for herself. So, she hatched a plan. Her first attempt to murder her step-sister was unsuccessful. She engineered a car crash in which her step sister and her husband were to die. Neither died in the crash, but they were both in dangerous conditions. The husband was getting worse and worse (soon to die), but the woman was not. Upon realizing that the crash did not kill the woman, the step-sister realized that she was in luck, for her fiance was a doctor at the local hospital. Instructed by the step-sister, the fiance became the woman's primary doctor and poisoned the woman with a non-lethal drug that feigned death, making it appear that the woman's car crash-related injuries were getting worse. The woman was buried alive in a double coffin, in the arms of her dead husband. The father of the step daughters assumed that the woman his daughter had died from the car accident, and all of the money went to the step-sister that the woman never knew she had.
Mistress ----- Father ----- Wife (out of the picture)
| |______
| |
Doctor / Fiance ----- Step sister The Dead Woman ----- Her husband
The woman is a researcher at a Japanese lab that studies people who were poisoned by the radiation that came from the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She became infected not by the bomb directly, but by severe exposure to victims shortly after the bombing (1946). Her murderer was the man who flew the plane that dropped the two bombs of Japan. The woman started showing signs of weakness, and eventually realized that she had an incurable disease. She died in her bed months later.