Welcome to EGG 22! This one has turned out to be a little longer than I have been shooting for recently, so I cut out the What have I been doing section this time. It will be back next issue. My review of "Last of the Mohicans" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will keep. I felt it was more important to include Richard madder's write up of his recent Matrix Game run. Not only does it sound like he had a good game but he also has some good ideas in how run MGs differently than I do. About this time of year I start thinking about what the next PBM game will be. This year is no exception. I'm thinking about taking a cue from my wife and running a murder mystery game. I've done a couple of solo MG mysteries based on the Sherlock Holmes character. Each game begins with a basic description of the crime and a list of possible suspects. Each turn the Holmes character gets to make 2 arguments to find clues. In one run I also had an Inspector Le Strad character who got one argument a turn. After the investigators finished making their arguments I allowed the "Murderer" to make one argument to establish alibis and make false leads. The game had not more structure than that. Since my games were solo, I could not very well know who the Murderer was from word go. Instead it was like investigating a real crime. One tries to discover who might have done it. Theories emerge about how and why it was done. Finally this narrows the field of likely perpetrators until the investigators decide that they can show that one person has opportunity, means, and motive to do the act. They then arrest the man. The murderer's arguments begin to rule suspects out since he will be trying to protect "who dun it." I think this leads to an unconscious choice on the murderer's part as to who really did it. What is funny is that since Le Strad only gets only one argument a turn, he tends to use the murderer's false leads and so miss who "really" did it. After all, if the murderer says that Col Mustard did it with the candle stick in the library, then Mustard must be innocent! In the Le Strad game the above was about to happen, when Holmes argued "Tut tut Le Strad, you've arrested the wrong man.. .again!" A very fun game. I think it will work well as a PBM. Back to Experimental Games Group # 22 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com