Date night is the right time for escape-room or killer-hunting games

This magnifying glass was supposed to be for decorative purposes only - a $5 Home-Goods find that looks cute stacked atop the oldest books on my shelf.

Yet here I am, on a Saturday night, squinting through its dusty lens in the hope that I'll spot a well-hidden clue on the piece of paper in my other hand. One couch cushion over, my boyfriend frantically types random letters we found on another piece of paper into Google Translate, hoping they turn into real words in another language.

I sigh. Maybe we're overthinking this. But what if we're not? What if these little details are how we end up catching a murderer?

We're working on a "Hunt a Killer" mystery, something best described as a mashup between subscription boxes and escape rooms. This is the second of six boxes in a series, and we're attempting to crack new clues while also building upon "aha" moments from the first box, which we solved on a similar night about a week back.

But, for the moment, we're wheel-spinning.

"I don't know if you can overthink the boxes," Hunt a Killer co-founder Derrick Smith tells me a couple days later. "If by overthinking you're receiving that enjoyment of playing the game, then that's something. You get out of it what you put into it."

I laugh and tell him I must be getting a lot out of it.

Smith and his co-founder, Ryan Hogan, first launched the game in 2016. They began with a live-action event, in which they gathered 600 murder-mystery and true-crime fans in a 81-hectare Maryland campground scattered with clues, and watched as the amateur Agatha Christies competed to solve the mystery first.

"We had entertainment, food, beverages and people camped out afterward," Smith says. "It was successful. But ... we weren't going to scale up through live events."

Instead, to create a viable business that taps into the wealth of true-crime lovers in our post-Serial society, Smith turned to the world of subscription boxes, a market that saw an 800 percent growth between 2014 and 2017, and reaches millions of Americans.

"We discovered it would be a lot easier for us to package the experience and deliver it to everyone, instead of bringing everyone to a central location," he says. "So this concept of telling a compelling story, but also making it interactive led to the idea of a monthly box."

When they first began sending out boxes, the team wrote simple mysteries that were solved in one self-contained box. Then they thought bigger.

"Three or four boxes in, we decided that if those were the TV show, let's do the movie," Smith says. Now, the lead writer creates a sweeping murder mystery, which subscribers solve over the course of six boxes, delivered to their doors every month. Some clues are easily cracked. Other nuggets may need knowledge acquired through several boxes.

A little more than a year after its launch, Hunt a Killer now reaches about 28,000 monthly subscribers. Most fans are in the United States, while there're a small following in Australia.

Smith isn't surprised by his company's success. Not now, when subscription boxes and true crime are so hot in the cultural manifest.

Add that to the fact that millennials are known to choose experiences over material possessions, and a box stuffed full of an interactive experience just made sense.

"I think people enjoy having tangible items to play with, instead of things being flat on a screen," Smith says. "There are plenty of apps you can play online, where you can escape the room, or solve something. But I think there's a real value when people are actually holding the clues and there's things to learn about how the paper is folded, or there's invisible ink or something."

Plus, who doesn't love that code-cracking moment?

When I happened to solve the first cryptic clue through quick logic, math and reasoning, I felt like a genius. And, honestly, that was enough for me and my ego to keep going.

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