The Balsam Lake Unmurders is a journaling game about trying to catch a serial necromancer in a forested Minnesota town. Hearts, diamonds, and clubs from a deck of playing cards represent victims, suspects, and other people in Balsam Lake, as well as your interactions with them. A subset of the spades are your successes and failures at discovering who among your suspects had the opportunity and has the motive to be the necromancer, and how they did it. Method. Motive. Opportunity. And then you make an arrest.

The pages are organized like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Each card you turn takes you to a prompt box for what to write about next in your journal.

I've been so caught up in journaling games the past three years. I wrote a zine about how to play, and how immersion works, titled The Ink That Bleeds, and I've made The Balsam Lake Unmurders to be immersive in all the ways I wrote in it. So it's not clue-based forensic crimesolving like CSI and other shows, which isn't how most crimes get solved anyway. It's conversations with suspects. It's intuition. It's connecting with people and relationships. It's time with your thoughts.

You do have just eight spade cards for trying to discern method, and motive and opportunity for a suspect, and you won't always succeed — but you're a good detective, so with some luck, and a little strategy, you can do it.

Play your cards right, puzzle it out, catch the necromancer.