Jubensha, translated from its original Chinese as “script(ed) murder,” shares similarities with Western murder mystery dinner party games, yet equating the two oversimplifies a far more complex cultural phenomenon. Since the 2010s, in China, where the scripted murder game trend originated and subsequently exploded, Jubensha has captured the hearts of many Gen Z players, making Jubensha parlors into the coveted third spaces away from home and work that many Millennials and Gen Xers once found in malls or cafes. A 2021 consumer insight report on physical Jubensha by Meituan projected sales reaching approximately 2.2 billion USD, reaching over 9 million consumers. In less than 20 years, a multi-billion-dollar industry has blossomed in the East, with parlors expanding westward.
The genre is difficult to categorize because it has no set framework. A traditional game typically includes six players—often involving an exact split between three masculine and three feminine roles. Together as a group, the six players attempt to solve a central homicide, in which one of the investigators is the killer, tasked with evading detection while participating in the very game meant to expose them.
This basic framework is merely a starting point. With tens of thousands of Jubensha parlors competing across China, many have moved beyond the traditional whodunit structure to stand out in an overly saturated market. Today’s scripts frequently subvert player expectations through high-concept storytelling devices, including unreliable narrators, non-linear storytelling in the forms of alternate realities, supernatural horror, etc., and non-lethal mysteries, which shift the focus from murder to more “emotional” storylines, where a Jubensha session looks less like a murder mystery and more like group therapy. These emotional games have proven exceptionally popular, especially among younger audiences.
While Jubensha parlors are opening in the United States, this Chinese phenomenon still hasn’t quite exploded in popularity in the same way they have in the East. For many Chinese youths, going to a Jubensha parlor is a way to meet new people. In the U.S., however, people may be less likely to play in-person games with strangers and instead join established friend groups. Roleplay as a hobby has taken off in the years following the COVID-19 era lockdowns, with websites like Roll-20 helping to facilitate roleplay in remote sessions of games such as Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games. Wizards of the Coast LLC reported a 33% increase in sales related to their TTRPG role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons in 2020, continuing a pattern of steady growth over the preceding six years.
Unlike traditional social deduction games, the real play element of Jubensha is less about solving the mystery through logic and more about engaging with the scripted roleplay in an authentic manner. That is, if you are tasked to play as a father to another character in the group, and suspicion is put on your “son,” what would you do? While objective information may point directly to the character playing your son as the culprit, your character’s motivations, as their father, might fundamentally clash with the raw facts of the case. In a standard social deduction setup, you would likely push on your information, aggressively exposing lies and prioritizing a mechanical win despite how it might relate to you or to those you consider allies. In this specific Jubensha setup, however, you possess a deep, unique to you, character-driven desire to shield said player from suspicion, potentially forcing you to actively suppress the evidence in order to honor the emotional truth of the story, fulfilling its highest narrative purpose. It is this intrapersonal tension that remains highly unique to the Jubensha experience.
Those complexities make the game much more nuanced than murder-mystery dinner party games, and I suspect these types of games may become increasingly popular if they become more prevalent in the U.S., especially as more English-language Jubensha are penned, as well as more of the famous Chinese ones are translated.
