Cocktail Party Game · 2010–Present

The Racket

A party game that makes every guest feel like they are playing the lead role in a Noir film without having to act or follow a plot.

Roles: Co-Creator, Web Developer, Graphic Designer
Skills: Game Design, Graphic Design, Production Design, Web Development, Performance, Event Management, Creative Direction
Venues: Cocktail bars, corporate offices, private homes, social clubs
Scale: 15–250 people

Goal & Strategy

A whole city’s worth of crime, run by the guests.

Goal

Capture the thrill of a well-executed murder mystery while avoiding the genre’s design pitfalls.

Strategy

Drive the plot through an incentive system rather than a script.

The Racket's printed materials, props, and velvet bag

The Project

The Racket is a 75-minute noir-themed party game for 15 to 250 people. Every Guest arrives to find an Identity waiting for them—a unique profession with two Expertise that let them team up with or turn the tables on everyone else in the room.

All of them are competing to make the most money by the end of the night. Players leverage their Expertise to strike profitable deals, complete Capers like robbing the bank or joining the mafia, and acquire useful Items. There is no plot, no fictional characters, and no dialogue to memorize. Guests are handed specific abilities and a broad incentive, and the game becomes an exercise in emergent behavior and social politics. The story arcs that emerge are made entirely by the people in the room.

I began developing The Racket in 2010 and locked the final draft in 2014, when it became the founding product of Hoax. Since then it has run over 400 times in cocktail bars, corporate offices, private homes, and social clubs, for clients like Google, Meta, Wells Fargo, Twitch, and Adobe.

I designed every piece of paper in the room: the Identity cards that hand each guest a profession and two Expertise, the Commodities and Assets they trade, and the signage that turns any venue into a city with a bank to rob and a mafia to join. I also sourced apparel for a rentable costume trunk, curated the soundtrack, and chose the physical props—from briefcases and hourglasses to cash trays full of fake money. Along with producing the game itself, I also designed and built the promotional site that clients book through, archived in full in The Website section below.

Graphic Design

Fonts