This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Dead After Dinner is a game of familial drama inspired by movies like Clue, Murder on the Orient Express, and Knives Out, by Jenn Martin. I’ll get back to this, but that lineage made me feel like it might be a murder mystery and familial drama game, but it doesn’t turn out to quite be that. It’s a Descended From the Queen game, so that link is to a deck of physical cards.

This was the second game I was offered as part of Critique Navidad, and immediately…how do I review a deck of cards? Obviously, any Descended from the Queen game has rules, they’re just hidden in the cards themselves, and the prompts are as much a part of the game as the rules themselves. The difficulty, though, is that because Storysynth runs things for you, the rules there are different than the rules of the deck. Ok, reframe, this ain’t so hard. Get yourself together. I chose to review the deck.

Drawing through one of 8 decks with different backings, each player is assigned a random character at the dinner, and provided a resentment rating representing how they feel about their family and the patriarch at its head. The final scene and deck is where the detective questions the family and a murderer is revealed. Most of these phases change in size depending on the players, so the cards you draw will be somewhat unique to your play through, although it’s a small set to randomise from.

These phases are super clever, and both make Dead After Dinner just work, and also are the major way they depart from their source material. You see, in the source material, you start at the end: It’s all phase 7, where the detective arrives. All of the other information is unreliable, coming from the lies and stories the family tells. In Dead After Dinner, the family is telling their own truths, and the actual murderer is the one revealed at the end to have actually done the deed. If you come at this from the perspective of wanting a compelling murder mystery, this story structure isn’t going to satisfy you. Instead, Dead After Dinner wants to use the conceit of a murder mystery, to tell the story of a broken and dysfunctional family. You’re all telling your truths, your perspectives on each other and on the patriarch that your fortunes depend on. This is a drama, first and foremost. For me, that was a disappointing realisation, but it may not be for you. I think if you’re embracing this kind of genre, leaning into the unreliability of the narration, making chances around confounding other player’s stories, and running things out of chronological order, are all to a degree an essential part of the experience, and I’d like to see how prompts could be used to build an internal truth and support a story that presents the alternate truth you present to the world and family.

That said, the final set of prompts — the ones framed as the detective getting involved — are all positioned to reframe your past decisions as lies. That’s cool, but I feel a little backwards to the genre. The other prompts — most of them — are fairly typical of what appear in these prompt-based games, and follow the typical structure, effectively “What’s this thing? Who does it impact” in variations. They’re fine, I think, if they’re what you’re looking for in prompts. They simply aren’t, for me. They’re not structured enough. I’m trying to think, because both this and the previous game I reviewed were prompt-based, why I don’t feel like the prompts give the players enough to improvise a story from. I think in this case they rely altogether too much on our collective memory of, say, Knives Out, to be effective. I’m reminded of Alex’s uncharitably titled article, F**k You Design:

It will incite the reader to follow the fiction and use their imagination. Naturally, why else do we play if not do just that? To those who ask, but how do I situate these question in the fiction? What am I meant to imagine here? These are difficult game design questions, and this design proclaims: F**k you, figure it out.

I cannot help but think that the fact that a Descended from the Queen game is a deck of cards costing no small amount of money brings a desire for replayability, and the desire is being interpreted by the designers of these games as a need for vagueness, a reluctance to proclaim “Want to make Knives Out? Imagine this!”. But Knives Out, Clue and its ilk are as much the set design, the casting, the opulence of the mega-rich and those that surround them as they are the family dramatics that emerge from them. I do not think that the playability would be decreased by drenching the prompts in set design and charming and specifics. I want that: I think these are difficult design questions that there is a tradition of designers turning back on the players of their games in prompt-based games.

I’ll interrupt a moment to flag a safety choice that I find a little perplexing. Early in the deck, you’re told that being the murderer is opt-in. This feels to be presented as a safety choice, given its proximity to the x-card in the introduction. This surprised me, of course, because it raises the possibility of there being no murderer, and the question of how to resolve that. However, when you reach the end, we find out that if everyone opts out, everyone is the killer. As a safety rule, that feels profoundly unkind (although as a genre choice it’s fitting), and I don’t think in the context of safety it should be left to the end to reveal, as it is. This is a case where the gradual drip of rules through cards causes a problem, in my opinion.

Dead After Dinner isn’t exactly what I expected from the description, but it’s an interesting few hours to spend a night if you love nasty family dynamics. If your table has trouble improvising things whole cloth, though, this isn’t the game for you, unless you’re going to accompany it with a murder mystery viewing party to get everyone immersed in the absurdity of the imaginary worlds of Christie and Johnson. Now that I know what it is, I could see some really interesting approaches to it: I could see a series of games with the same charters modelled after Succession, for example. Really cool stuff, but it’s important to realise before bringing it to the table that the real juice here is in the drama, and not the murder.

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