Dinner with Murder

What it is

A role-playing game inside a murder mystery. Everyone plays a character and is both investigator and suspect. Moving among the guests are actors playing the other parts, and one of them is the killer.

Split into investigation teams, you collect and photograph clues, question the suspects and search the scene. Our trainers work as facilitators and directors: they hand out the parts, and the identity of the murderer is unknown even to the participants. It wants an exclusive restaurant space with room to move and an area that works as a stage, plus a sound system for larger groups, and it runs across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It can also run entirely online, for teams joining from different countries.

You don’t need to bring anything: our staff brings the props, the gadgets and the costumes. It can be staged over dinner, over lunch or even at breakfast, with the scenes unfolding between one course and the next.

A mystery to solve

A role-playing game straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. It’s the only murder-mystery team building where the people taking part are the investigators and the suspects at the same time.

It’s the most classic role-playing game there is, and by most accounts Christie invented it herself. In England it still runs every weekend at the hotel where she came up with it, at the end of the 1920s. Where other whodunnit entertainments have actors performing to an audience, here every guest has an active part, exactly as they did in the game she ran.

The event wants a beautiful setting, and it wants to be the only thing happening there. Guests are called in to play a character in a mystery in person. In a thriller’s atmosphere the events come one after another at pace. Divided into investigation teams, the guests have to dig, look for clues, question suspects and finally solve the case. There are twists, further deaths, phone calls nobody expected, real physical clues, and searches through rooms and grounds nearby.

A realistic crime-novel world for an evening or a whole weekend, and a full immersion in it that is as entertaining as it is gripping.

Which novels is it built on?

Agatha Christie’s, because of the range. The action sits inside a closed, controlled world, so the teams can concentrate on investigating; the characters are many and each has something of their own, so people have to watch and talk to each other; and the plot turns on logic and deduction rather than on action. They still read as modern, and there are so many of them that even a serious reader will never work out which one they’ve walked into. We also write plots to order, built around a company’s own themes and objectives.

How does the activity run?

Do you need to bring anything in particular?

No. TeamWorking’s master trainers take care of whatever object the evening turns out to need. For this format, nothing is required but you.

Observation, and an eye for detail

Focused on one specific objective, the people taking part have to:

An entertaining, absorbing experience that leaves useful training material behind it. In a place set apart from everything, you live an actual thriller. Hidden among the guests are singular characters played by actors, and a killer to find. Divided into teams, people collect and photograph clues, question suspects, or go searching after dark with nothing but a torch and their own nerve. Somewhere in there is the evidence of a strange and apparently inexplicable crime.

For one evening you are at the centre of a tangled mystery, to be unravelled with your own investigation team: through a run of surprises and reversals, you have to decide which lead to follow. In a setting with some history to it, you live an unusual adventure in the first person, and put your instincts, your reasoning and your nerve to the test. The evening can be filmed, which turns it into material to use again later. The day after, the management and the operational teams have spent three hours talking to each other as equals, and it shows.