I’m writing these ‘mystery’ posts on this blog to describe an adventure-mystery that I designed for my kids, and perhaps this will give other parents some ideas for something similar.
Origins
My friend, Mark, and I formed a (prestigious) mystery solving gang in Timmins, Ontario, back in 1980. By 1981 it had become known as The Simon 4. Simon & Simon was popular on television at the time. And The Hardy Boys was already taken.
We would meet at the house of two brothers, Sean and Craig, sitting around the little yellow table in their garage, and we would discuss what cases had come to our attention that week. And we would eat cupcakes that had our initials on them and drink lemonade. Never solved a single mystery. But we kept at the meetings regularly.
I recently thought it would be a fun idea to design a real-world mystery/adventure for my kids (aged 11 and 13) and several of their friends. I wanted the kids to suspend disbelief, having everything happen without my apparent involvement, and so one weekend I planned out a series of clues and mysteries and treks and objects that would become part of the grand story, which would only slowly be revealed over two months. Not sure the story ever made a lot of sense, but the skeleton of a mystery was there, even though elements were out and out silly (I included several popular cultural references that my kids couldn’t possibly know about , such as Terminator’s SkyNet, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 1983 WarGames movie, old spy movies).
The lion’s share of the story, though, was a recreation of the Baker Street Irregulars, a gang of street urchins that Sherlock Holmes sometimes used when working on a case. One of my favourite board games is Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (you solve mysteries as one of the Irregulars – great game) and I of course had to visit 221b Baker Street when I was in London.
And so …