A Dozen Teenagers Went to Homecoming and Solved a Murder

At the end of the school year, I was SUPER stoked when my teenager asked me to help her host a party for her ballet classmates. Y'all know how sad I've been that my kids no longer want birthday parties with all the trimmings, and I've been missing those themed parties with decorations and food and activities and kids. 

You'd think, then, that the teenager would be thrilled to have the expertise that she'd asked for, but that kid had the nerve to proceed to shut down ALL of my excellent party ideas. DIY paint-by-numbers and tea party food in the front yard? Too much work. Bounce house? Too babyish. Drive-in movie? Too public. Paintball? Too competitive. Murder mystery?

The teenager (mostly) stopped glaring at me, and instead asked for details.

Spoiler alert: this murder mystery was the BEST party idea ever for teenagers. It wasn't expensive or difficult, and maybe it's the fact that these are kids who live for the stage, but they were SO into it! It was delightful to watch them have such a delightful time, and everything went perfectly.

I purchased the Horror at Homecoming mystery, teen version, from Night of Mystery. This particular packet has everything that teen ballerinas could possibly want in a party--not only is there a murder, and a mystery to solve, but the framing device is a school Homecoming dance, which means that the kids get to dress up... and they get to dance!

You're supposed to be able to host the game AND keep the identity of the murderer a surprise even from yourself, but since I was hosting this for the kids, it was very helpful to be able to read through the entire packet and familiarize myself with all the secrets. Because I know all the kids attending, I could also rig the game a little to play to their various strengths--some kids enjoy being the center of attention and some don't, some wouldn't mind having to read stuff out loud and some would, and most importantly, none of the sibling sets would appreciate having their character mired in a love triangle with their sibling's character. Yuck!

The murder mystery packet is a LOT to sort through, and you have to have a firm guest list before you can really start, so my teenager had to actually pass out the invitations a month before the party. We gave kids about ten days to RSVP, then I made my teenager spend a few days nagging the holdouts for answers, and only then did I assign characters to kids and make the "official" invitation packets for her to pass out to the guests. Each invitation packet had the invitation, some murder mystery basics, that kid's character sheet, and a school newspaper with important info. To that, I added a couple of notes that the guests should plan to arrive within ten minutes of the party's start time, and that if they realized they couldn't make it, they should contact my kid ASAP. And then I proceeded to have a couple of months' worth of anxiety dreams about the murderer or victim, neither of whom would know how important their character was ahead of time, simply not showing up to the party!

There were no no-shows, hallelujah, but I had my college student on hand at the party as a swing, just in case. And there was a kid who ended up giving a last-minute yes, but fortunately I had a spare character to give her. Whew!

The only materials that you *have* to have to run the party are a million printouts, including a couple of sticker sheets for name tags, and envelopes. But we wanted the party to look as much like the cliche version of a school dance as possible--and I've really missed party planning!--so we might have gone somewhat ham, as the teen ballerinas say. We bought a bunch of serving ware and photo backdrop crap from Dollar Tree, I got out all my stash scrapbook paper to make all the kids' envelopes and accessories look mitchy-matchy and fancy, and my partner did a ton of design work to turn the print-out photos of "evidence" into real-live actual pieces of evidence that looked awesome.

And it turns out that Burger King does not care how many crowns you take from their store. We got enough for each kid, and my college student and I spray painted them all gold.

The plan for the party's pacing is so smart, with each guest receiving a sealed set of "objectives" when they arrive, and then another set after the murder. The objectives include certain things to say or do to certain other guests, and certain ways to respond if a guest says or does some certain thing to you. I LOVED this, because it got the kids immersed in the game right away, got them acting and interacting, and gave them plenty to do in between the dancing and snacking and chatting.

But it made me anxious about timing, because some of the objectives are important to the plot, so I felt like I needed a way to know when people had completed them, which wasn't something included in the game. 

My kids still have one instant camera and several packs of instant film left from that hot minute in their childhoods when they were obsessed with instant photos. We've actually made regular use of the camera and film throughout their years homeschooling, but I decided that I would not be sad to have the rest of that film used up, so I crafted a Homecoming decoration to go next to the photo backdrop:

I found a foam board in the closet, and used scrapbook paper and twine to decorate it for Homecoming. I added another set of character name tags to the board, and left enough room for an instant photo above each tag. The idea was that when a kid had completed all of the objectives that she was able to complete in the first round, she should take her Homecoming photo and add it to the board. As an added bonus, this board, with all the cute pictures of all the guests, made an absolutely adorable souvenir for my teenager to take home afterwards.

After the murder, I'd planned to reskin the board to highlight the victim and label everyone else as suspects, but in the excitement of the murder and the kids trying to solve the mystery I completely forgot! 

Regardless, the kids all used the instant camera a ton, and they all took home plenty of cute instant photos of themselves and their buddies. Totally worth bringing it!

I wasn't completely opposed to hosting the party at home, but since it *was* meant to be a school dance, we thought it would be cool to host it somewhere that had more of a school dance look, so we rented the gymnasium in one of our local community centers for an evening. Because it was a city space it was rentable for a terrific price, and we had a full kitchen available, bathrooms that we didn't have to clean, a ton of room, tables and chairs, a speaker system, and just enough of what I'm assuming were volleyball or badminton net posts standing in a corner that my partner could set up the twinkly lit dance floor of my dreams:

We even made a custom Mayhem High Homecoming dance playlist, because that's the best part of party prep!

Here's a secret: the kids loved the songs and did a ton of dancing, but just between us, all of the work to think out how to mark out a dance floor and getting my partner up and down a ladder to set up the twinkle lights for the dance floor and compiling a playlist and figuring out the speaker system was actually just so *I* could dance:

Actual footage of me dancing, taken by my dancing partner who is also dancing...

My partner needs to take me clubbing a LOT more often than he does.

So, you guys. The parties that we host always go pretty well, mostly because all of my kids' friends are wonderful people, always thoughtful and polite and participative and sensitive to making sure everyone around them is having a nice time. But this was the BEST party we have ever hosted, the absolute funnest party ever, and again, all because of these kids. Teenagers are a whole other species, you might be aware, and you can never quite tell how they're going to respond. If these kids had been mortified about the idea of acting, and didn't want to dress up and pretend that they were at a Homecoming dance, and thought the idea of solving a murder was boring and didn't want to try to figure it out, this would have been the worst possible party. 

But instead, it was the BEST party! All the kids were totally in character, acting their sweet hearts out. They came ready to attend the Mayhem High Homecoming dance, and danced and ate snacks and cheered for the Homecoming King and Queen and gossiped and stabbed each other in the back and danced and blackmailed each other, all in character, all seeming to have a marvelous time:

The kid whose first round objective informed her that she was the murder victim played her part up to the murder like a freaking rock star, then fell down dead right when she was supposed to, to much shrieking and mourning:

She played the second act in the role of her ghost, and earned the prize for having the most money left at the end of the game primarily by guilting people into donating to her funeral, I'm given to understand.

Because I knew all the secrets, I watched the face of the kid who was the murderer as she opened the envelope that revealed that secret to her, and damn, that kid's face did not change expression at ALL. I wish I had half that poker face! She then proceeded to play out the second act by dropping so many red herrings and false clues that only one kid successfully pinned her as the murderer by the end of the game.

All the other kids played their parts like champs, so in character that it turns out many of them had made up backstories and thought up extra details and fleshed out story arcs--it absolutely worked to completely confuse the "official" plot of the mystery to such an extent that I'm not surprised that only one kid ended up guessing the real murderer, but OMG they seemed to be having the BEST time.

In the end, everyone got to fill out a ballot to accuse the murderer, state how much money they had left, and vote for their favorite characters in a couple of categories. We revealed the murderer with much fanfare, and gave out prizes for correct guesses, most money, best costume, and best acting. For party favors, everyone got a Homecoming crown (thank you, Burger King!) and we set up a candy buffet for kids to fill take-home baggies on the way out. 

If you're running a similar party for teenagers, here are my tips:

• Have extra materials on hand for kids who didn't do their homework. I printed extra character sheets and school newspapers and brought them to the party, because party guest prep work turned out to be everywhere on the spectrum between "my parents quizzed me on my character for a week!" to "I lost all my stuff the same day I got it." When a kid said they didn't remember their character, it was easy to just hand them the second copy of their materials without making a big deal of it.
• Have extra characters on hand. This is important to figure out in advance, because Night of Mystery, at least, has you purchase the game for a specific quantity of characters, both a minimum and a maximum. It was a bit tricky to buy a pack that had wiggle room, but not being able to accommodate a last-minute RSVP or unexpected kid showing up would have fueled my nightmares for the rest of my life. I had a couple of extra characters on hand that I could easily add to the game if an extra kid or two showed up to the party, and we were able to assign a character to a kid who gave a last-minute RSVP without fuss. 
• Have a fun framing device. A school Homecoming dance was perfect for the kinds of activities this group of kids likes, and it gave them space to also enjoy being at a party.
• Build in plenty of extra time. I wasn't really sure how long it would take the kids to complete all the parts of the murder mystery, so I set the party to last a full hour longer than my longest estimate, figuring the kids could use the extra time to just have fun together. That was perfect because it took the kids a LOT longer to complete the second act of the game, in particular--they got so invested in their backstories and character interpersonal drama and various shenanigans that they got VERY distracted from actually collecting the evidence, but since I'd built in all that extra time I could just let them enjoy themselves. The game finished with half an hour left before the end of the party, which was kind of perfect--the kids ran around the gym and took tons of instant photos and had a blast talking through the game while Matt and I got a bit of a head start on cleaning up.

This is the first party I've held at an alternate location since my college kid's first birthday party, and dang, if I had all those years of kid birthday parties to do over again, I might never have had a birthday party at home at all! Packing up all the crap to take with us did take a while, but we didn't have to deep clean the house and make the yard look nice. It was a little stressful to set up the entire party in the hour we'd allotted ourselves, but I wasn't setting up for the entire week before the party, either. It was also a little stressful to clean up on time and pack the car back up, but then I didn't spend the entire evening and next day cleaning my house all over again and washing a million dishes and taking out the garbage. 

Imagine: a Homecoming dance, a murder mystery, two dozen cupcakes, several pounds of candy, eleven happy party guests and one happy host, me on the dance floor, and I didn't even have to mop my floors.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!