After the success of Kenz’s birthday party (when I threw my own NYC murder mystery dinner right in my apartment!!) I decided I wanted to do it again. This time, there’s no big occasion; I just wanted to see how these would work for a casual get-together with friends! Luckily, I have a lot of friends, so I was able to find a big group (16 people) of willing participants for my little experiment!

I found another company that makes the game-in-a-box mysteries, and this one is British! Not many people know this about me, but I’m also slightly obsessed with all things British. Mackenzie once told me that means I’m an Anglophile, so there’s that. Anyway! I decided on You Only Die Once which I later found out is a play on a James Bond story.

Their website is super nice looking and it seemed really professional, with lots of great sections of content to dive into. I like that they had drop down menus at the top to help you navigate and filters to help you find the exact type of game that you were looking for. You could search by number of players, theme, and even by rating. Super helpful! And, while I’m usually cautious when buying something online from another country, this didn’t seem sketchy at all, so I felt totally fine with it! Like the last company, Red Herring Games gave us the option of either downloading everything needed for the game or having them send it to us in the mail already made. Of course I chose the second option, because it’s just so much easier and why give yourself the extra tasks if you’re already busy preparing the rest of the party?!

The people I invited were a mixture of co-workers, my friends, a couple of Jeremy’s friends, and a couple of Mackenzie’s friends. I wanted to try to make it a well-rounded group between males and females just to see how it would go and who would like it more! I was glad that there was an even number of characters for each, and my favorites were Jeremy’s character (Ernst FuzzyFelt) and my co-worker Alison’s (Dr. Easter Jones) and they each played the parts perfectly!

I really liked that they gave us recipe suggestions, sound files for detective speeches, and character booklets to help us all get into character. Their extras did seem to be lacking in comparison to the last one we tried, which gave us things like mini games to play and a themed website to look at! But I don’t think it was enough of a negative to keep us from having just as much fun as before.

I will say that a couple of my guests did comment on how confusing the story was. And I admit that there was one point during the climax (no spoilers!) that I just could not wrap my head around. So it was just a little less accessible to my non-mystery-aholic friends because they were less invested in paying attention than I was! But, I served some super classy food to go along with the classy spy theme that everyone really enjoyed! We had martinis, shrimp cocktail, and cucumber sandwiches with a bunch of other delicious stuff too!

The price was just under $100, but shipping from the UK was an extra expense. Of course, if you choose to download the materials instead of having them shipped the price is much, much lower. If I try this company’s games again I will definitely stop being lazy (if my mom is reading this she probably just fell out of her chair) and do the downloadable option.