Description

Anton Draganov died quietly, of a heart attack, in his home in Cortessa — a free-port city where he spent decades as one of the region's most careful black-market antiquities dealers. Within a week of his death, his private study was searched. His personal ledger — a lifetime of transactions, kept in a cipher only he understood — was gone.

You're investigators for a private cultural-heritage recovery organization that had been quietly building a case against him for years. This isn't a police matter — there's no warrant, no arrest. What's at stake is whether a cache of looted cultural property gets returned to where it belongs, or vanishes into the market for good.

What you get:

A full printable evidence packet — decades-old correspondence, financial records, personal notebooks, cross-border shipping documents — paired with three real digital gates: a personal webmail account, a corporate travel portal, and a business bank, each unlockable only once you've found the right credentials hidden in the physical evidence.

One of our most demanding cases: three people worth suspecting, three separate accounts to unlock, and a genuine shift cipher you have to work out for yourself rather than simply find written down. The ending may not feel as clean as you'd expect — that's intentional.

• Format: Printable PDF evidence packet + web-based digital investigation
• Players: Solo or a group — works well as a personal investigation night
• Typical solve time: 120–160 minutes, longer if you follow every lead properly
• Framing: You're private investigators for a cultural-heritage recovery organization, working through negotiation and provenance research, not police authority

Every detail — the cipher mechanic, the cross-border financial records, the international correspondence — is built to hold up under real scrutiny. Nothing hands you the answer; everything has to be assembled, including a code you'll need to actually crack yourself.