The case file is the game.
Cold Ink Casefiles makes printed murder-mystery dossiers that look and feel like real police files. No board, no apps, no campy roles. You open the folder, spread the evidence on the table, and find what the original investigators missed.
We wanted the case, not the game.
Most murder-mystery games read like a stack of scripts. Pages of dialogue. A required host. Notebooks of rules. By the time you finish learning how to play, the suspense is gone.
We started Cold Ink to build the opposite. Open a sealed packet. Read a coroner’s preliminary. Cross-reference a hotel keycard log with a witness statement. Argue with whoever you brought along. The evidence does the work the rulebook used to do.
Every Cold Ink case is researched, written, designed, printed and assembled by a small team in Canada. We use real document formats, real police forms, real forensic templates. The fictional businesses, characters and crimes are ours. The dossier behaviour is the real thing.
One person made yours.
Every Cold Ink Casefile is printed and assembled by hand, not by a factory line. The packet you open was stamped, numbered, sealed, and quality-checked by a real person before it shipped. That is the difference you can feel before you read a word of evidence.
This is the first case. Not the last.
No. 001 Black Sand opens the series. No. 002 is in production. The full series will run for several years, with one new case every quarter once we hit cruising altitude.
If you want to be the first to know when a new case is dropped, the fastest way is the free mini-mystery below. It comes by email. It takes about five minutes to solve. You will know if this format is for you.