Christmas Robbery Mystery Game

Santa had just finished putting all of the toys onto his sleigh. He then returned home to enjoy a well-deserved treat.

As Santa went to fetch his treat, he noticed the plate was empty. Someone had stolen his treat!

As Santa’s highest-ranking Christmas Elf, you must solve the crime and find out who stole Santa’s treat.

You have the names and details of 32 suspects who were in the area when the crime took place. The thief is one of them.

There were five witnesses to the robbery. Each witness has left you a clue. The clues have been given in code so that only you, with your amazing code‐breaking skills, will be able to crack them and solve the crime.

You can decode the clues in any order you wish. Every time you solve a clue you can eliminate some suspects.

Each clue will remove half of the suspects from the list, until you are left with just one…

Who is the thief?

Game Play

The robbery mystery takes approximately 30 minutes based on players’ experience, skill, age and group size.

Extra Ideas

For groups or pupils who solve the mystery quicker than others why not have them write a secret message of their own for their classmates to decode.

• You could have some keys printed out for them to use (e.g. Morse code, pig pen cipher, braille, semaphore etc… these are easily found with a quick web search)

• You could suggest they hide a message in a passage of text (e.g. have their message in capitals or back words letters with in text) or for it to be read left to right.

• They could design their own code / create symbols for each letter of the alphabet and use it to wrote a secret message.