The Ravenwood
Affair
A murder mystery you solve like a logic puzzle. Five guests, five rooms, five weapons. The clues never name the killer — you have to work out the whole picture, and only then does the murderer stand exposed.
Snow sealed the roads before midnight. Inside Ravenwood Manor, Sir Alistair Ravenwood held his New Year’s Eve party. By the small hours the guests had thinned to five, and each had drifted off to a different room of the quiet house. At the stroke of twelve, Sir Alistair was found dead in his study.
Each of the five rooms held one object that could kill, and each guest spent the night alone in a room with the object it held. So the killer is whoever was in the study, and the weapon is the object that room held — but not one clue tells you either. What the eight clues give you is which guest held which object, and which object belonged to which room. Cross those two facts and you learn who was where. The last guest left standing in the study is your murderer.
Every clue is true. Not one names the killer, the murder room, or the murder weapon — each only links a guest to an object or an object to a room. The guest’s room is never stated; you work it out by crossing the two.
Three grids, worked like a printed logic puzzle. Tap a cell to cycle it: blank → β (no) → β (yes). Marking a β auto-crosses the rest of its row and column. Fill the first two from the clues — then the third is yours to work out: no clue fills it. That is the whole puzzle.
π± On a phone? Turn it sideways for a roomier grid — and tap the π Clues button anytime to pin the clues over your work. Tap a grid’s title to fold it away.
Fill this from the evidence — clues 5 to 8.
Fill this from where each object belongs — clues 1 to 4.
No clue fills this one. Combine A and B: a guest’s object tells you their room. Whoever lands in the study is the killer.
The body was in the study. From grid C: which guest did you place there — and from grid B, which object was in the study with them?
About This Murder Mystery Logic Puzzle
The Ravenwood Affair is the first case in Armchair Detective, a free series of solvable whodunit puzzles from Best Trivia Games. It is a true logic-grid puzzle in the tradition of Cluedo and Einstein’s “who owns the zebra” riddle. Five guests, five rooms and five objects give thousands of possible arrangements, and the eight clues rule out every one but a single consistent picture. The trick is that no clue ever says where a guest was, or names the murder weapon, or the killer. Each clue only links a guest to an object, or an object to a room. You have to cross those links yourself to discover who was in the study — and that person is the murderer.
You work it on three grids — guest to object, object to room, and the guest-to-room grid you fill in yourself by combining the first two — marking every pairing with a tick or a cross, exactly as you would a printed logic puzzle. There is no trivia to answer and nothing is handed to you; the whole game is the reasoning. Every clue has been verified in code to leave the killer genuinely open on its own — each one alone still leaves all five suspects in play — and the full set has exactly one answer, reachable by pure elimination with no guessing. It plays in a few minutes on any phone or laptop, needs no signup, and ends with a spoiler-free verdict you can share to challenge a friend.
How to Play
Read the clues
Eight true statements. Each links a guest to an object, or an object to a room — never a guest to a room.
Fill grids A & B
Tick guests to objects from the evidence, and objects to rooms from where each belongs.
Derive grid C
Cross A and B: a guest’s object gives away their room. Fill the guest-to-room grid yourself.
Unmask the killer
Whoever grid C places in the study is guilty. Name them and the object that was in the room.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Ravenwood Affair?
Is it solvable by logic, or is there guessing?
How is this different from a trivia quiz?
Why does no clue just name the murderer?
Do I need an account or app to play?
Will there be more cases?
Verification & Sources
The Ravenwood Affair is an original work of fiction and a formal logic puzzle. Its solution has been verified in code to be unique: of the thousands of possible arrangements of guests, rooms and objects, exactly one satisfies all eight clues, and it is reachable by logic alone with no guessing. Last reviewed July 2026.
- Solution verified unique by exhaustive check: exactly 1 of 14,400 arrangements satisfies all eight clues, and every clue taken alone still leaves all five suspects possible.
- Puzzle tradition — the logic grid and the “Zebra Puzzle” — reference
- Deduction game tradition — Cluedo — Encyclopaedia Britannica