If you were called on to guess the best-selling tabletop games on Amazon, you’d probably opt for a household name like Monopoly, or one of its exhausting catalog of identikit variants. Much of the time – sales numbers vary day by day, of course – you’d not only be wrong, but likely astonished to learn that Monopoly, Scrabble and a host of other well-worn names are regularly outsold by a humble series of murder mystery games called Cryptic Killers.
"Our bestselling game, Murder of a Millionaire, has consistently been above Monopoly’s classic board game for quite some time," says Andrew Hobbs, co-inventor of the series. "We’re super proud to be up there amongst the big guys." It also made IGN's list of best murder mystery games.
Perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that this sales behemoth arose from a chance holiday meeting. "Luke Stephenson and I met each other at the beach bar in Mexico, over a beer back in 2012," Hobbs continues. "When the holiday came to an end, we added each other on Facebook and left it there. We both thought we’d never see each other again."
Fate, however, had other ideas. Both men were fond of keeping notebooks to scribble down ideas and inventions when inspiration struck, and it was something that came back to them five years later when they considered starting a business together. Hobbs picks up the tales. “Fast forward a couple more years, and we found ourselves enjoying a few detective style games during the pandemic,” he continues. "We both believed that we could do a great job of creating our own range of games in this genre, so we got to work, and Cryptic Killers was born."
Even at the height of lockdown, however, murder mystery was already a crowded genre, and the games needed a selling point to help them stand out from the crowd. They turned to another in-vogue genre for inspiration. “We knew that true crime on Netflix, Amazon and the like is extremely popular,” Hobbs explains. “We wanted to mimic the type of feeling that you get after watching a great crime documentary, and we knew that if we could do that, we’d be onto something.”
But they also put a lot of thought into how to make sure the game started and remained compelling as players worked their way through the evidence. "Our cases contain multiple suspects with different motives, and players get a sense of achievement each time they’re able to eliminate one of the suspects, so rather than having one win at the end of the game, you have multiple “mini wins” throughout the experience," Hobbs explains. He’s tapping into what psychologists call a feedback loop, where you achieve a small gain and immediately feel like you want to put your new knowledge into practice. It’s pleasurable and addictive, and is one reason why some games have that "one more turn" feeling, but it’s unusual to find it in a murder mystery.
Their initial design, Murder of a Millionaire tasked players with identifying the killer of an unlucky lottery winner from a cast of well-drawn characters, using a varied case file of evidence that included photographs, witness statements and ephemera such as train timetables and newspaper clippings. Solving the case called for a surprising variety of skills, from logical deduction, through puzzle solving and into the good, old-fashioned grunt work of picking out tiny details from images and reams of text.
The amount of information involved can make it feel like the game is best suited to a solo sleuth who can digest it all and not have to repeat reams of text for the benefit of a group, but Hobbs believes a small team works best. “The games encourage conversation,” he observes. “Most games have you competing against your peers; our games are the opposite, needing collaborative play. People digest the information differently to one another. This means that one person may pick up on a clue that someone else didn’t.” The breadth of different approaches required to solve the case also support the group approach, as it benefits from a range of skill sets.
While the case presented was thorough and compelling, some of the image work had room for improvement, even if it was supposed to represent the grainy images of CCTV. That’s partly because the intrepid designers had to literally do it all themselves. "Luke and I both appear as characters in the games because we didn’t have the luxury of being able to hire actors and professional sets," Hobbs laughs. "It is actually Luke’s wife who is laying in a puddle of blood in the crime scene photos from Murder of a Millionaire. As our games have evolved, and budgets have since increased, we’ve been able to invest more time and money into developing higher quality assets."
There were also elements of it that felt like a stretch, such as the idea that the investigating detective would just pass over their notes to a colleague, with no verbal explanation, and leaving them without essential information such as a password, which is one of the game’s opening puzzles. “We created a scenario that was possible, even if it wasn’t probable,” Hobbs explains. “The implausible often adds an element of fun or intrigue to the storyline. Take the story of Ted Bundy. He escaped from custody not once, but twice. He also represented himself in court, and proposed to his girlfriend while she was on the witness stand. If that didn’t seem implausible enough, some of the evidence in the case had been mishandled or lost during the investigation too!”
Leveraging a password as the basis for a puzzle also allowed the designers to explore new avenues of play, adding an online element to the experience. “It makes the games more interactive, more immersive, and allows us to introduce different types of media into the game such as video and audio,” says Hobbs. “It also helps with staging the game play. Sometimes you want players to read a piece of information in a certain order to lead their mind in a certain direction, and that’s not always easy to do if you hand over a case file of evidence where they can read it in any order they wish.”
Murder of a Millionaire sold well initially, but its real success came after a fan featured it on TikTok, showcasing the growing power of that platform to market long-playing tabletop games, despite its short-form video format. "When we first went viral on TikTok, we didn’t even have an account there," Hobbs recalls. "Sales went through the roof and have remained that way ever since. I remember calling Luke, saying we needed to be on TikTok, and we ended up in the early hours of the morning pulling together bits and pieces to set up the account. We are extremely grateful to everyone that posts about us on social media, it really helps small companies like us."
From that initial explosion, Cryptic Killers has become a diverse range of mystery modules with a dedicated fan base who like to swap completed scenarios with each other once the solution is out. Hobbs is happier about this than you might imagine. "It hearkens back to the old discussion of whether libraries are a good thing for book authors," he observes. "If someone shares one with a friend, there’s always a chance that friend will come back to buy another one of our cases for themselves. It also helps us to build our community of loyal detectives, and encourages more word of mouth marketing. One way other companies have gotten round this is to create game assets that must be destroyed as part of the playing process. That’s not a route we wanted to go down."
Further scenarios have led to Hobbs and Stephenson looking to add new elements to the gameplay to keep things fresh for fans. One thing they’ve become renowned for is a sense of theatricality, which was missing in their first games. “We’ve added more drama to each of the stories, heightened by introducing unique methods of murder, such as a poisoned saxophone reed,” says Hobbs. “Our later releases are themed to different decades, like the 1920s or the 1960s. This allows us to change up the type of evidence in each of the games.”
Of course, as the games have gone on, Hobbs has particular favorites from the titles he’s worked on. “My personal favorite is Murder at Merivale Manor,” he reveals. “It’s the case set in the 1920s, but you’re trying to solve the case in the present day.” But in terms of individual puzzles, he’s most proud of the double-whammy in Murder in Market Hill. “There is a big plot twist to the game and this particular puzzle incorporates two different puzzles that need to be solved to get to the answer,” he continues. "But I can’t say too much more without giving the game away!"
Despite the popularity of their murder mystery series, Hobbs is aware that he and Stephenson need to explore new territory to keep things fresh. But he’s staying as tight-lipped about what that might involve as he is about his precious puzzles, saying only that there’ll be a new case file soon, followed by the Cryptic Killers range “diversifying” into new areas. Fans of the series will have to do their own sleuthing if they want to try and figure out what that might mean.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
