The Balsam Lake Unmurders is a journaling game about trying to catch a serial necromancer in a forested Minnesota town. Hearts, diamonds, and clubs from a deck of playing cards represent victims, suspects, and other people in Balsam Lake, as well as your interactions with them. A subset of the spades are your successes and failures at discovering who among your suspects had the opportunity and has the motive to be the necromancer, and how they did it. Method. Motive. Opportunity. And then you make an arrest.

The pages are organized like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Each card you turn takes you to a prompt box for what to write about next in your journal.