Jury Box (game)

The Jury Box is a 1937 parlor deduction game created by Roy Post and published by Parker Brothers, which became popular in the United States in the late 1930s and is regarded as an early predecessor of modern murder-mystery and role-playing games. One player takes the non-scoring role of District Attorney, reading a crime story aloud and then handing round two crime-scene photographs for the rest of the group, who act as jurors, to examine. Each juror studies the story and photographs independently and, without conferring with the others, writes down a verdict of guilty or innocent along with supporting reasoning. Fifty points are awarded for a correct verdict and a further fifty for reasoning that matches the sealed correct explanation included in the box. A boxed set contains six separate cases, each built from a crime story, two scene photographs, a sealed envelope holding the verdict and reasoning, and blank ballots for the jurors' answers, with a single case running about fifteen to twenty minutes.