Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I play maybe a half dozen one-shot/escape room/murder mystery-style games a year. I’ve written so many reviews of these deduction titles that it’s hard to even remember them all at this point!
I know a winner when I see one, and on the heels of some of the best games to hit the market in this category with the entries from the KOSMOS Masters of Crime series, I am continuing to explore the market. I’m sure other publishers are making great titles here…right?
During my visit to Germany for SPIEL Essen 2025, I picked up a copy of My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey from the team at Horrible Guild. There’s no getting around it—the title of this game is terrible. I might have even said that to our friends at the publisher…”My Murder Mystery” is the name of the series? “A Dead Monkey”??? What is going on here? Even if some of this was lost in translation (Horrible Guild is an Italian publishing house), I still can’t figure out why they landed on “My Murder Mystery.”
(My 11-year-old heard the game’s title and was horrified by its implication: “do you have to investigate the murder of a MONKEY???”
Don’t sweat it. The title is terrible…but the game here is magic, and it instantly becomes a serious contender for one of my favorite games of 2026.
We’ve Got a Dead Monkey Problem
My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey is a competitive deduction game for 5-7 players. That player count might be hard for some gaming groups to accommodate, but this is essentially a dinner party mystery game, where multiple players could win based on the scoring system.
The game is set in the year 2002. A team of criminals, hired by Don Vito Sovetta, robs a bank in downtown Las Vegas. After securing the loot—the Wunderbar, a priceless artifact—the gang swiftly returns to their hideout to celebrate a big payday when the power cuts out. When power returns, one of the gang members is dead. It’s up to the players—each taking on the role of one of the criminals—to figure out who killed “The Monkey”, the codename for the dead gang member who also happens to be Don Vito’s 20-year-old son.
Standard fare, to be sure. While the seemingly retread backstory didn’t wow anyone in my play group, the individual player setup did wow the players. Everyone has a rich backstory listed on the backs of four cards per player, with each player given a somewhat elaborate history to reference as play rolls forward.
Over the course of five rounds, the game leaves almost everything in the hands of the players to basically act out, using a set of eight locations that can be visited, and personal objectives that drive players to find out both who murdered the Monkey, but also answer other burning questions about the backstory of each character.
At the end of the game, My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey uses a system similar to games like Alibi: 3 Intricate Mysteries, where everyone has a chance to hear closing arguments from anyone who wants to continue litigating their innocence before everyone can point a finger at the person they think is the murderer. Then players find out who’s who, in a fun epilogue tied to the backstories of each character.
My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey nails the part that worried me the most: the backstory scripts really solidify each person’s role, and it pushes everyone to both sell themselves as the person who is NOT the murderer, but also to investigate what else is really going on here. The best part of this mechanic is the speed—this ended up being a two-hour game for my group of six players. A dinner party murder mystery game can sometimes take 4-6 hours, with players sometimes getting pre-work details on their characters before they arrive to play (and that’s before doing something elaborate, like having everyone show up in costume).
Here? This game is very much a weeknight murder mystery game, with hidden agendas, chances to use voices (or not), satisfying payoffs with the character stories, and an easy-to-administer voting system that lets players veto the choice of locations picked by the leader of the current round. There is a bunch of conflicting information to throw players off the scent. By the end of our game, our finger pointing led to five of the six players drawing at least one vote as being the potential murderer.
The only hole in the design was the decision process behind picking a new leader (active player) for each round. This becomes important, because the leader gets to read a card full of secret clues to themselves each time they start a round…effectively giving that person a little more info than other players have. Each player gets two action tokens for the game, which can be used at any time to veto the choice of a location or to look at the extra info cards.
But having the chance to be the round leader can be powerful. This does not automatically move to the next player in clockwise order. The leader gets to pick anyone at the table to be the next leader, meaning that a leader could be selected twice or even three times in a five-round game. In our game, three of the players held the leader role (so, two of them did this twice); I wish this was moved to other players automatically. The other boost for the leader? The leader who holds that title in the final round gets to break voting ties when a suspect is pointed at during the end-game accusation process.
Get It
My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey was solid. Our group spent almost our entire game yelling at each other, trying to get someone to break when they tried to describe why their character took certain actions during the game. We laughed hard as people tried to bluff their way through an explanation, or made a closing argument to tell the table why their character did NOT murder the Monkey.
Referencing my backstory was pretty easy thanks to the setup cards for my character. Each player has two story cards, a list of the relationships they have between the other characters featured in the story, and an objective card where they can track what story elements are important for their specific end-game scoring condition. It was always easy to sort through the noise, to focus on the locations and the characters I needed to prioritize.
More than anything, My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey made it easy for a non-actor to act his way through the game, so I was very satisfied as a player who has no future in the movie business. The game setup also gets around the need to have a centralized gamemaster serving as the MC for the game’s proceedings. And the content works for gamers and non-gamers alike, although I do think of this as an adult game versus a family investigation experience.
As a one-shot mystery game, My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey was a blast. I highly recommend this game if you have a group game to act out a scenario as characters in a heist-gone-wrong format. I’m already excited to try other games in this series!
My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey details
- Designer: Emanuele Briano
- Artists: Alex Twin
- Publishers: Cranio Creations, Horrible Guild
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 5 - 7
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 120 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Acting, Area Movement, Deduction, Hidden Roles, Hidden Victory Points, Role Playing, Roles with Asymmetric Information, Traitor Game, Voting
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.54167 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.5.
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