Bruce Whitehill

This murder mystery game was fun until the end when it became more of an aggravation.

This is a game in which the players read a variety of materials from a ‘case file’ which provides the details and clues to the solution of a murder. By reading the investigators’ notes, news articles, witness statements, etc., the players should be able to identify the culprit.

In Mile High Murder, the mystery surrounds the poisoning death of artist, Marisa Hightower, on a flight to London. Marisa is en route to receive her share of her former husband’s vast estate. Most of the other heirs named in the will are on the flight, too. But, whodunit?

My family really enjoyed reading through all of the materials & discussing all of the possible suspects, motives, & potential scenarios for the murder. For the most part, it was an entertaining way to spend quality family time around the dinner table…until we reached the end, then we all grew irritable & grumpy for three very specific reasons.

First, going into the analysis of the ‘case file’ we were all expecting there would be one or two definitive clues insidiously hidden within the materials that would make the identity of the murderer absolutely clear. There weren’t.
There is no “smoking gun” in this game, & players are left guessing who is most likely rather than who IS the killer. All of the suspects have the exact same motive, means, and opportunity for committing the crime.
We’re old hats at fictional mystery solving so we managed to narrow it down to the two most likely suspects, but—for the most part—this turned out to be a guessing game rather than a figure out the solution game. That was very disappointing.

Second (& worst of all), the game requires players to go online to verify the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of their final solution, and it is completely unnecessary. The epilogue and the final exonerations (or guilt) for each suspect could easily have been included in envelopes within the physical case folder, but, no. Players have to go online to see if their solution to the crime is correct. What a ridiculous nuisance!
Here we are as a family, sitting around the dinner table, enjoying each other’s company, laughing and discussing the documents outlining the mystery story, wondering if our final guess is the correct one…and, boom, we have to get a technological gadget involved because someone has to go to the computer or drag his phone out to go to the company’s website to read the solution which should just be in the game box in the first place. I can’t describe how irritating that was. Good way to kill family fun night, University Games!

(The website also supposedly contains additional clues to help you in case you get stuck. That is such a joke; these so-called additional clues just re-hash info that is already obvious from the case file. Such a waste of time.)

Third & finally, the individual explanations for why the suspects are guilty or innocent of the crime in question actually contained ‘facts’ that made no sense, or that actually contradicted facts outlined in the physical ‘case file’. It’s like there were several different people involved in creating this mystery, & they couldn’t be bothered to coordinate the clues and the story details with one another so they just wrote what they wanted to with complete disregard to what was going on with the rest of the game. Consequently. the information in the final summations online actually has nothing to do with the information provided in the ‘case file’; the end result is absolute chaos.

For us, although we enjoyed the initial interaction with the ‘case file’ and our discussion of the materials and possible solutions, we did not appreciate having to go online and we certainly felt like all of our efforts were wasted because the online story went against the info we had just spent the past several hours deliberating.

The spirit of the game was a blast, but its execution was a big let down. We received another version of this game series as a gift, so we’ll be playing it at some point over Christmas. However, I would never buy another game from this company again.… (meer)