User Blog:
Getting Away With Murder

I killed a man. I didn’t mean to do it, and until I sat at the table I didn’t realise I’d done it. Even at that point I didn’t know the man’s name or why I had done it, though I knew I had used a cricket bat and committed the murder in the library.

It was like a bizarre form of retrograde amnesia.

Before we go any further I suppose I’d better mention that we were playing ‘Accused! Getting Away With Murder?’, a board game written by Theodore Aitken and published by Twisted Winds.

You see, the point being that in the sleepy little town of Hambleton-on-the-wold (I just made that up) there was a brutal and nasty murder and one of us had done it. No points for guessing since I already told you it was me.

The game takes on a bit of a left turn at this point because as far as I can see, figuring out who did it is about as pointless as dropping marbles into a candyfloss machine. No, we (the loyal and peaceful citizens of Hambleton-on-the-wold) do not care who did the murder, we just care about making sure the police don’t think it was us.

To this end, we are given a few hours released from custody by the police to do some serious thinking. More to the point we have a couple of hours before the trial to run around town frantically scubbing all evidence of our guilt from every surface in every building in every way.

Anything that might link you to the murder, the scene, the weapon, anything… all of it has to be binned, scrubbed, shredded and lost as quickly as possible because the first person to get back to the police station claiming innocence will ruin it for the rest of us.

The rotten bastard.

So not only had you better have an alibi for where you say you had been, but you’d also better not have any body saying you were in places that you didn’t say you had been. Let me put it this way, if you haven’t told the police you were in the bar that night, then the barman’s not going to help you voluntarily.

You better silence him, and money makes a very good way of doing that.

I chose to use a claw hammer. In exactly the same way that I discouraged the hobo in the woods from talking about me.