The guests walked into Mr. Boddy’s beautiful mansion and assembled in the gathering hall. Mr. Boddy’s butler warmly welcomed guests into the mansion and began to explain the various rooms in the house.  As he spoke, the lights suddenly went out and a loud scream reverberated through the room; a sense of panic filled the room. Once the lights came back on, the guests were frightened at the sight of Mr. Boddy’s lifeless body laying on the floor. The butler ran over, checked for a pulse, then declared, “Mr. Boddy is dead. He’s been murdered.”

The SURC Ballroom filled with about 35 people, or the “guests,” who came to play the murder mystery game based on Clue on Wednesday, Feb. 21. The only difference was that this game was set up with people instead of game pieces and a board. Ballroom C was divided into seven different sections, each representing a different room in Mr. Boddy’s mansion.

There was the library, ballroom, study, observatory, kitchen, dining room, and the common hall where everyone started. Just like the board game, each section had a student who played one of the characters. There was Mrs. Green, Professor Plum, Mrs. White, Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, and Mrs. Peacock. The guests were broken in teams of four to eight and talked amongst themselves to figure out their game plan. The students running the event also got into character. Every character in the game had their own group.

For example, Colonel Mustard’s group was given dog tags to differentiate themselves from other groups. Miss Scarlet’s team had red roses, Mrs. White’s had dusters, Professor Plum’s had purple bow ties, Mrs. Green gave all her players green beaded necklaces and Mrs. Peacock gave her team peacock feathers.

The objective of the game was to find out who killed Mr. Boddy, what room he was murdered in and what weapon he was killed with. Each group could move around and ask each character a series of questions to find out clues about who killed Mr. Boddy. The event was open to the public.

Groups moved from character to character every minute in clockwise rotation until they could finally figure out what happened. In the end it was Mrs. Scarlet’s team who figured out how Mr. Boddy was killed. It turned out that Mr. Boddy was killed by Mrs. Peacock, with a candlestick in the study.

The winning team consisted of  Kristina Alcaraz, a public health major, Hayley Anthony a film major, Gracelyn Krause, a biology major, Juliane Luna, undecided, and Jared Medina, who is not a CWU student, but friends with the other members. They all agreed that the actual process of solving the crime was their favorite part of the entire event.

“This is my first time going to one of these events on campus and I thought it was really cool. I’d come back for sure,” Medina said.

This event was put on by Campus Activities. Mia Patterson, student event coordinator for Campus Activities, played the role of Miss. Scarlet, who was also Mr. Boddy’s mistress. Her team was the ones who figured out the murder by the end of the game. She described her character as sexy but also stuck-up.

Many of the other people who played the various characters all agreed they loved being able to be a part of this event. According to them, the most difficult part was staying in character and figuring out a way to represent their character to the best of their ability.

“Getting to dress up, having my own teams, and being able to give each person a souvenir from my team was probably the best part,” Patterson said.

Citlali Mason, intern at Campus Activities, was the one who organized and planned most of the event. She was accompanied by Katelyn Clavette, who helped Mason co-plan the event. They explained that the planning process for the event started fall quarter.

They set up the event the day of and it ran from around noon to about 6:30 p.m. During that time, they were mainly getting the details all taken care of so that the murder mystery event would run smoothly.

“I was at home playing Clue and I thought it [would be] fun to do something like a murder mystery party since those are big right now and I thought this would be a fun way to do something fun and different for students to enjoy,” Mason said.