Who Sat Where

A Christmas mystery you solve one dinner at a time, from the first of December to Christmas Day.

New York, December 1889. Old Augustus Vandermeer has told his family that on Christmas Day, at his own dinner table, he will sign a new will. Every evening of Advent the Vandermeers sit down somewhere: to dinner at Washington Square, in their church pews, in a box at the Opera, round the whist tables, in the big sleigh in Central Park. Every evening something small goes wrong. And Miss Ivy Marchbank, the family's social secretary, who draws all their seating charts, was never in the room.

So you work out who sat where. Each evening is one puzzle: a chart of the room, a handful of things people told Ivy afterwards, and the guests. When you know who sat in every chair, the person in the starred chair answers the evening's question. On Christmas Day someone puts a sleeping drug in Augustus's wine in the dark, and only the two people beside him could have reached it. To work out which of them did it, you need what you found out on the evenings before.

Who it is for

Adults who like a cozy mystery and a logic puzzle, including anyone who has never solved one. There is no arithmetic, no trivia and no guessing. It works on your own with a pencil, or as an after-dinner game for two to six people with the printable place cards. Nobody dies: it is a Christmas book.

How it works

• Three short lessons and a practice evening first. How to read a chart (the head and foot, the sides, fans for ladies' chairs and top hats for gentlemen's), what every word in the clues means with a small picture of each, and the method: pencil every guest's initial into every chair they could have taken, then let the clues cross them out. The practice evening is solved with you, move by move, with the pencil marks shown.
• 25 evenings, one for each night of Advent and Christmas Day. Each one is two pages: the story and tonight's question on the left, the chart, the clues and the guests' place cards on the right, with room for notes.
• The tables grow. The first evenings seat six. Christmas dinner seats twelve. In between: round tables by the fire, a church pew, an opera box, a sleigh, two whist tables, the front staircase, a theatre row and two bazaar stalls.
• A seating book to write each evening's answer in. On Christmas Day some guests are named only by what they did in Advent.
• Three hints for every evening, from where to start to one sure fact, kept together at the back and away from the answers.
• A full answer for every evening, starting on a page of its own: the completed chart and every move in order, with the clue that justifies it, and what the answer tells Ivy. Then what happened at Christmas dinner, and afterwards.

Every puzzle checked

Each chart was solved by a computer program twice: once trying every possible seating, to prove that exactly one fits the clues, and once using only the moves the lessons teach, with no guessing. The printed answers are that second program's moves, in order. A third, separate check confirmed the answers, the hints and the facts the story depends on.

The pictures

A cast of fourteen in engraved portraits, so you can tell the Vandermeers apart. Evening scenes in the hand-tinted engraving style of the 1880s illustrated papers, period prints by Thomas Nast and Currier & Ives, and the evidence Ivy finds drawn as it would look: a Delmonico's menu, a pawn ticket, an I.O.U., a carol sheet, a warning card in violet ink.

Your files

• Who Sat Where (PDF, 110 pages, color, US Letter), with bookmarks and links from every chart to its hints and its answer.
• The Place Card Kit (PDF, 29 pages): fold-over place cards for all nineteen people in the book, and all 25 charts again on white paper, one to a page, for printing and solving at the table.
• A ZIP with both PDFs and a short start-here note.

Good to know

• Print the pages, or write on them with a tablet's pen in any PDF app. They are not fillable forms.
• The pages are US Letter. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page."
• American spelling. The Vandermeers and everyone in the story are invented; the New York around them (Delmonico's, the old Metropolitan Opera House, skating in Central Park, Saint Nicholas Eve) is as close to 1889 as we could make it, with notes at the back.
• It is one story, so it is solved once. You can print clean charts from the kit as often as you like.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.