The case file is the game.
Cold Ink makes murder mysteries you hold in your hands. Printed case files that look and feel like real police dossiers, and dinner party games where your guests play the suspects. No boards, no apps, no rulebooks. The evidence does the work.
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.
Why I make these.
I am Rob Cosman, and I have been a murder mystery fan for about as long as I can remember. The week I wrote this I was back watching the first Clue movie for probably the hundredth time. Rest in peace, Tim Curry. Nobody ever ran a dinner party off the rails better than Wadsworth.
Here is what I want from a party. A night adults actually look forward to. The kind you want to dress up for, without a costume that takes a week to build. A linen shirt and a pair of sunglasses and you are the heir to a fortune. Reading glasses and a stern look and you are the family lawyer with something to hide. Give people a character they can slip into and a secret to keep, and watch what happens to a room.
Somewhere along the way, getting together as adults got hard. Everyone is busy, every plan dies in the group chat. I make these games so there is a reason to put a real date on the calendar, get people around a real table, and laugh at your accountant doing an accent. If one of my games gives you that night, I did my job.
Rob Cosman
Founder, Cold Ink Casefiles
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.