Happy Monday everyone,
As you all know, I am currently on a flight to Beijing China right now. However, as I had blogged about on Friday- I have a few pre-written posts that will be coming up while I am enjoying my vacation.
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As I had my murder mystery party over the weekend, I thought I would break up the event into two separate posts. First up, what Mark and I did to host the party, and secondly, how it all turned out.
First up: Deciding which party to throw
I bought my party through the website Night of Mystery. I chose this website, rather than the many others that were available, because I had been to a murder mystery party before that had been from the same place and it had been great.
The website has a bunch of different parties- including a Hollywood theme murder (which is the one I had already done), a millionaire theme, tropical vacation, prom, and so many more. I decided on the 1920′s, as I thought it would be the most fun to dress up to.
Before a package can be bought, you need to know how many people are attending. The smallest package is a 5-10 people, and the largest is around 40 people. In the past, I’ve gone crazy with inviting everyone I’ve ever met to my birthday, but for this party, I only wanted to invite people that I knew would play along, as well as who would enjoy themselves (some people just aren’t the murder mystery type). As such I ended up with a list of 15 people.
Now I was able to buy the package:

The “package” is a PDF that’s about 90 pages long, and has all the information you’ll need for the party.
Next up, we had to “Cast” the characters and get the invites out with time for people to get their costumes together. Mark and I sat down with the list and tried to cast people for who we thought they would play well- but some of it had to be random. Some of the characteristics listed for the characters were pretty nasty descriptions- such as “Gold-digger, conceited, only concerned about themselves”. None of my friends are like that so it was hard to cast that character.
Once the characters were cast, and the invites out, it was time to get the costume together, decorate the house, and get the character envelopes ready.
It took 2-3 hours to get all the information ready, as I had to create 2 envelopes for each character, one to open when they arrived, and one to open after the murder. Plus cutting up the money, name tags- it was mindless work I did while watching tv.

Decorating the house was pretty easy- they have a ton of print outs included in the package which we just taped up. You could certainly go a lot more extreme than Mark and I did, but it came down to a matter of time.
Mark and I both went all out for our costumes. We found a party store that still had some costumes, and then supplemented with extras we either already had, or could buy at the mall.

Then, we were ready for the party! No pictures of us in our costume quite yet, as I like to build the anticipation!
Check back on Wednesday for details of how the party actually went.