Death on the Gambia: A Murder Mystery Party Review

Death on the Gambia is set on an African riverboat in 1939.

The world is on the brink of war, and those tensions find their way onto the riverboat Christabel. Intriuge, espionage, and murder abound!

Jane Carter: Jane is an American journalist working for the Gambia tribune.

Dexter Fairchild: a big game hunter, returning to England from an expedition.

Captain Sam Ironheart: the captain of the Christabel, charged to bring his passengers safely to their destination.

Katanga: the First Mate of the Christabel, and a native of Gambia.

Joey Keene: a detective, investigating what?

Connor McDouglas: a Scottish archaeologist, returning home after a trip looking for artifacts.

Marie Renard: an elegant French artist.

Gabe Schwartz: a German doctor who works tirelessly to bring aid to the jungle peoples.

Caroline Tanner: a widow from England out to see something of the world.

Alex Thomas: the chief buyer for the Happy Peanut Spread company, out touring peanut plantations.

Vic Townhill: a missionary from England.

Death of the Gambia can run with anywhere from 8 to 11 players.

In addition, I've managed to reduce the number further by eliminating Jane Carter and giving any of her plot specific items to her roommate on the Christabel.

As the host of the game, you have a lot of work to do!

Before the game starts, you have to recruit players, and print out the contents of the game from the PDF you'll download. You'll need to cut up item and ability cards, and put everything into envelopes for each character. Allow several days for this, unless you're like me and like to do it all at once (in which case, allocate a four hours or so).

During the game, you handle rules questions and moderate any unusual actions people want to take. Mostly, though, you enjoy watching the scheming going on around you!

Death on the Gambia runs quite well with the materials provided by Freeform Games.

But there's one thing I did that made the game even better. One of the plot points in the game is the numerous copies of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile floating around the boat.

While you can play these books with item cards, a large portion of the fun for players is stealing books from other people.

So what I did was to go to the Wikipedia page for Death on the Nile and download the cover image they have there. I then printed the cover out onto a sheet of paper, and taped together a book jacket out of two sheets of paper.

I did this for as many books as I needed in the game, and then put the book jackets onto hard back books I had on my bookshelf.

I taped the original item cards for each book to the inside cover of the jacket.

This way, each player who started with a book actually had a book to carry. The books were awkward to carry around, so they might put them down temporarily, only to have someone else switch books with them.

Great fun!

You can get more information about the game by downloading the introductory PDF.

Or, if you just want to buy it, click one of these according to your payment preferences. You'll be able to download the PDF files for the game in a short time.

Enjoy!





Or to pay via credit/debit card: