Curtain Up, 19:00 | Japanese-Style Murder Mystery for 5-10 Players + Host | Printable PDF | 100-130 min

CURTAIN UP, 19:00 — a Japanese-style murder mystery for 5–10 players and 1 host. 100–130 minutes. Printable PDF.

A sixty-seat theatre. A company that has been going for fifteen years, playing the opening night of the production that ends it. Curtain up at 19:00.

Late in the play, the lead lifts a glass and drinks. It is a piece of business the company has done hundreds of times over fifteen years. The glass has always held plain water.

At 20:50, Kaoru Hasumi — forty-seven, the actor this company was built around — drank from it.

Five minutes later he went down. The audience applauded. They thought it was staged.

The water was poured by the props assistant. It is in the log, signed, and nobody is denying it.

— So the question is not who poured. It is how long the pitcher had been like that.

There is no vote in this game

In most murder mysteries everyone votes at the end to name the killer. Not here.

Word from the hospital has not come yet, and the company has to settle two things before it does.

1. Tomorrow’s performance: does it go up, or is it cancelled?
2. What does the company say happened?

Those two answers, combined, are the ending.

The five of you do not want the same thing. Some of you need the run to continue. At least one of you cannot stand on that stage again.

WHY IT WORKS AS A CLASSROOM ACTIVITY

• Close reading with stakes. Every clue is a document students have to read carefully. Missing one detail changes who they accuse.
• Evidence-based argument. Players make a claim, cite the document it came from, and defend it against the other readings at the table.
• Structured discussion. Fixed phases — reading, discussion, investigation, final discussion, resolution — so the conversation does not drift.
• No preparation beyond printing. The host script is written to be read from the top. No rules to adjudicate, no dice, no components to assemble.

HOW THIS DIFFERS FROM A MURDER MYSTERY PARTY KIT

If you have run a boxed “murder mystery dinner” before, this is a different genre. Please read this before buying.

• The host does not play. They run the game. That is what lets the story hide information the way it does.
• Each player gets a private booklet with a secret only they know, and two goals — one shared with the table, one private.
• The culprit is a player, not the host, with their own goals to pursue.
• Single use. Once a group knows the answer they cannot play it again — but you can run it for new groups as often as you like.

WHAT YOU GET (10 files, 9 of them PDF)

A read-me for everyone, a host script with the full running order and read-aloud text, the evidence set, one private booklet per character, and a plain-text version you can paste into a video call or a shared document.

WHAT YOU NEED

5–10 players plus one host, 100–130 minutes, and either a printer or a shared screen. First-time hosts can run this. Everything prints in black and white on ordinary paper.

LICENSE

Classroom and club use is fine, including running it for as many groups as you like. Streaming and let’s-plays are allowed, monetized or not. Please do not redistribute or resell the files, claim authorship, or post the solution publicly.

HOW THIS WAS MADE

This scenario was written with the assistance of an AI language model (Claude, by Anthropic), then edited, structured, and consistency-checked by a human before release. The plot, characters, clue structure, and all text were reviewed by the maker.

Ai-Q Labs makes murder mysteries in which all the evidence is text — a corrected page proof, a radio log, a weather record. Check out Ai-Q Labs for the rest of the series.