1. Synopsis

The Silent Dinner is a narrative-driven murder mystery set during an exclusive dinner party in 1927, a week before the eve of the grand opening of the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie in Dessau. As influential guests gather to celebrate, the dinner is abruptly disrupted when the body of Gregor Voss — a feared and influential art critic — is discovered with his throat slit. The gallery’s excitement turns to suspicion. Each guest becomes a suspect, and players must work together, uncover secrets, and piece together clues to solve the murder.

The game unfolds over a series of 3 rounds, where players reveal aspects of their character, engage in strategic conversations, and react to hidden information. Testimonies, objects, and secrets are distributed through envelopes, and accusations build as more is revealed.

Players engage with the post-WWI cultural atmosphere of 1920s Germany, particularly the role of art institutions, critics, and the growing influence of modernist movements. They get a glimpse into how power and opinion shaped reputations, careers, and collections within the early museum landscape — all grounded in the historical context of the newly established Gemäldegalerie.

2. Character Development

I worked on two characters: Rosa Wurze, the head chef of the gallery, and Quill Fletcher, an investigative journalist.

Rosa is quietly intense, proud of her work, and haunted by a violent past.

Quill is outspoken, sharp, and still recovering from a career-destroying scandal linked to Gregor.

Both characters were developed by writing full life timelines, mapping out how they would behave during the murder event, and identifying core triggers in their backstories. This helped me ensure that their motives were emotionally believable and historically plausible. 

While working on the characters, I learned the importance of internal conflict — not just what characters do, but why they hesitate or spiral. Writing from their POV helped build empathy, even if they had done questionable things. It also taught me how useful timelines and event maps are for keeping stories tight and believable.

As a group, we built relationships between characters by assigning shared histories, secrets, and rivalries. Each character had a reason to either fear or resent Gregor. We made sure no motive stood alone — all were entangled, just like in real social dynamics.

Yes. Rosa was initially too passive, but her backstory evolved to include an incident in a military camp — an attempted assault by Gregor, which she violently resisted. This gave her real agency. Quill started as just a disgraced journalist, but we added a public assault and jail time to deepen his resentment and give weight to his presence at the dinner.

3. Team Collaboration

Each of us was responsible for developing two characters, including their timelines, motives, and how they interact with the murder. We collaborated on the central murder plot and how characters overlapped in their stories. One person handled the main narrative structure, and the other two worked on designing and printing the game components.

For the research process, we began by reading about the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie and the broader 1920s German art scene. We looked into the history of museum openings, the roles of critics. For character accuracy, we also researched wartime roles for women, press freedom, and scandals in the art world.

For the collective storywriting process, we created a shared timeline of the evening and decided who was where during key moments. We then plotted which character knew what, which object they’d possess, and which secrets could be used to either defend or incriminate them. Each round of the game was structured to reveal new evidence, ensuring pacing and tension.

We made decisions democratically but relied on whoever had the strongest vision for that aspect. If someone had a clear idea, we let them lead, and others gave input. We used visual maps and shared documents to test overlaps and contradictions.

Creating characters and their motives went very well — everyone was invested in the story. The challenge was putting all the charactes together and filling out the plotholes in each character's story. Also creating a tangled web of the characters together, how their motives and personality align with each other was also a challenge. Designing for a real-time dinner game also meant keeping things modular, easy to follow, and visually clear.

4. Conclusion

We underestimated how much effort the printing phase would take — especially with so many different elements that needed to align perfectly, and printing both on the front and the back of the collaterals. 

For me, the biggest achievement was designing the game that was visually attractive and maintaining a consistent branding across different design collaterals.

I learned how to structure a narrative across multiple players and timelines. The character writing exercises — especially writing from a character's perspective — helped me think about storytelling in a much deeper way. I also learned a lot about product-thinking: how a user (or player) moves through an experience, what confuses them, what excites them. These are lessons I’ll take forward in any kind of design project.