The Making of the First English Jubensha

Jubensha, the Chinese game format where players work with and against each other to solve a mystery, is a special interest of mine. It’s that rare thing, a brand new, phenomenally popular form of social immersion in fictional worlds. It’s also still fairly unknown among English-speakers.

Last month, I explored what makes Jubensha different to role playing games, larps, and murder mysteries (spoiler: “collaborative sensemaking”). Afterwards, a co-founder of Singapore-based KMS Games, creators of what may be the first original English-language Jubensha games, reached out.

I already knew KMS Games from People Make Games’ video focusing on Jubensha (which means you can stop sending it to me), so I was excited to learn from an expert about the challenges of designing and selling Jubensha to a brand new audience. For Jubensha that’s played in person, the business model is that creators sell game scripts and props in a box, usually to venues who then host paid games with it; KMS Games sells the box, but typically doesn’t run games.

My conversation with c&t, as he prefers to go by, has been edited for length and clarity, and covers:

How they got started
Why escape rooms in Asia are so impressive
Demoing Jubensha to 400 people at a games convention
How much Jubensha cafes cost in London vs. Singapore
Sales figures(!)
What it’d take for Jubensha to take off for English-speaking players

You started making Jubensha in 2021. Can you tell me a bit more about how that happened?

My friend was toying with the idea of starting a Jubensha cafe [in Singapore], bringing the scripts from China and hosting games. Renting space in Singapore is really expensive, so we thought the best way forward would be to create English games where people can try this cool craze that’s in China but make it more accessible to English-speaking audiences.

The first game we did [Laboratory of Death] was about relationships on a university campus. We thought it was relatable at that point, especially with a lot of incidents like bullying and harassment in the news. We wanted to communicate some of these ideas within the game. We also were coming from watching Who’s the Murderer? for a couple of years. I love murder mysteries, and my friend reads a lot of murder mystery books. I read a lot of nonfiction, so we thought that we could put a lot of ideas into this. We’re huge escape room fans and whatnot as well.

We just did it. Didn’t expect it to go anywhere, actually. It was because of the People Make Games video, where they wanted to find out more about Jubensha in Singapore, that we had the platform. After doing that, we realised that there’s so much potential in games being meaningful. I think that’s something I felt from reading your blog, where we did our second game, Melody of Waves, in partnership with Singapore’s government. They were calling for ideas on communicating the threats of terrorism and climate change to youths today, and then we were like, “Oh, why not pitch our idea, try using Jubensha.”

So we did kind of like a Jubensha game, which we hosted for a limited public run. It was quite successful. The feedback was great, so we moved on to the next step where we filmed local celebrities playing it on Youtube. I think, today, a lot of English-speaking audiences look at it to understand how Jubensha gameplay works. That was pretty surprising. It wasn’t intended for that audience. But in the end, a lot of our audience comes from abroad.

The more recent news is that we went to PAX Unplugged last year, where 400 attendees tried our games, and we launched our latest game, Secret Tribe. This year we’re going to more conventions. We’re going to Gen Con as well. I didn’t expect a small game creator just interested in this area being able to go so far.

Before I forget, because you’re thinking about immersive art, escape rooms in China and Korea would be a perfect fit for [the book you’re writing] because of their narrative structure and storytelling and immersiveness. They’re just on a different level.

Do you think they’re different to escape rooms that you played in the UK or elsewhere?

The thing is that I’ve only played one escape room in the UK, which is the Sherlock escape room, because they say it’s the best in the UK.

Definitely popular, yeah.

I was very disappointed.

Why?

It felt very disjointed. The puzzles were very “guess and check”, very dexterity-based. There wasn’t any immersiveness. I was very underwhelmed compared to the standard of games I’ve played in China or Korea.

What for you is a really good, really immersive escape room?

It’s when I’m into a story. There’s one that I was so immersed in [And I met E at Dungeon in Seoul]. I’ll just spoil it since it’s Korean.

Basically, you start in a post office. You’re a postman, and you’re supposed to deliver letters. You go through a door into another room that’s like a machine. When the same door opens up, you’re in a completely different room and you realise that it’s a time machine. You solve some puzzles there, then deliver the letter. One room is in a school, one is on a camping ground, one is in a house.

That’s a lot of rooms.

A lot of rooms. But the thing is, you don’t even notice it because your movement is so seamless. You’re in this time machine and you don’t even know how you get teleported into the different spaces. I have no idea how huge the whole place is because there are just so many different elements to it and it’s so seamless. And there’s a story in every scene.

It builds up to the final space, a black and white room. They had this very cool visual effect where it looks like you’re in a polaroid picture. It was only in that scene that you realise that you aren’t a postman but rather you are a patient suffering from severe Alzheimer’s disease, and that a psychologist has asked you to unlock memories that have been stored in different parts of your life. And that revelation was… wow.

That’s really cool.

Really really, cool.

I’ve been to a few dozen escape rooms, but I’ve got friends who’ve been to hundreds, and I haven’t heard of anything on this scale or with this kind of storytelling. What were the puzzles like?

The puzzles didn’t feel like puzzles. You’re supposed to answer the phone call, or solve why the letter isn’t sending. It didn’t feel like you were actually solving puzzles, it just felt like it was a narrative flow. You were just like doing tasks like how you would immerse yourself in a story. It wasn’t like the Sherlock one where they were like, “Oh, there are five panels and you must solve ABCDE to be able to escape.”

The scale is very different from what we have here. Was there any role play in the Chinese and Korean escape rooms you played?

I don’t think I have played any. Maybe they will immerse you like, all of you are postmen, but don’t think I’ve roleplayed a character. There was one live Jubensha experience in Singapore that closed down, where you could role play. They gave you costumes and you could go to the set to find evidence. There was a host with you throughout, but it was still quite a bit messy and it didn’t take off.

Going back to your games. Your business model is selling boxed games, is that right?

That’s the best way forward for us now because it’s a way to make it accessible. People can just pick it up after dinner, show it to their friends and say “Oh, let’s play this now.” Of course, we want to do the kind of meaty, juicy stories that need a host or a nice set to play in, but those need to wait.

So your games don’t require a host?

Our games don’t require a host. It’s like what the paper said, where players collectively play the role of a game master together.

Is KMS Games your full time job, or something that you’re doing in your spare time?

It’s in our spare time. This still takes a lot of time, because our workflow when we write a game is that we test on the weekend, then we edit it over the week, and then we test it on the weekend again. So when it’s like going into all these sprints, it does take quite a toll.

How did you get into games? Did you study them?

No, I didn’t study games. You don’t have to, especially if you’re joining a new area. I was always interested in game design when I was young, but back in 2000, if you wanted to make video games, the route to doing that was either becoming a programmer, an artist, or a game tester. I felt my maths and my programming skills were okay but not really good. And becoming an artist or tester was not feasible.

So I went to Cambridge and I focused on experimental psychology and neuroscience. But in 2000, the first alternate reality game [The Beast] was released, and I was one of the really early players. I wrote the main walkthrough and was one of the community moderators. When the game was over I was fascinated by ARGs because they took place on the web, and for the first time it was a game that I could look at and think, “Oh, I could make this. I have all the skills required because I can write HTML, I can go and set up all these different things.” I thought, one day I’ll have a job doing this.

My plan was to start a blog where I would write about ARGs. If I can get myself really high up in the Google search rankings, then someone is bound to give me a job at some point. It took three or four years. In 2004, I’d just started a PhD at Oxford in neuroscience, and I got offered the job to be a full time game designer, the first employee at Mind Candy, making an ARG called Perplex City.

Because the area was so new, there weren’t any university programmes. There wasn’t any professional route into it. There are very few people making these things. It meant it was much more accessible for someone like me to get in there if I was just interested.

Obviously, Jubensha in China is very popular. But Jubensha in English is not at all popular, so for someone like you, you don’t need to do a [games design] degree. I mean, it helps. But you just need to be thoughtful about how you’re designing games. I think that’s what my blog demonstrated, when I would write about new ARGs from a business point of view, or from a game design point of view.

That’s how I got into it. For three or four years I was creating Perplex City. Because it was such a small company to begin with, I was doing everything. I was answering the mail and I was hoovering the floors, but I was also designing the game and negotiating with suppliers and hiring people. After that, I co-founded Six to Start, which is the company I’ve spent most of my time at, and made Zombies, Run! and lots of other games.

It’s interesting how your games have this serious game element, this educational element, with the government involved. Laboratory of Death has a serious element to it, you know, and certainly Melody of Waves. Secret Tribe, I don’t know whether that’s meant to have an educational aspect or maybe it’s just pure fantasy.

There’s something for players to take away, whether they know it or not. Something that maybe they’ve learned or seen in a different way. We wanted to do that from the start, make games a bit more socially meaningful. With Secret Tribe, it’s not really anything specific, but like there are some themes involved, not to spoil it.

You went to PAX Unplugged. How was that? You had 400 players. There are nice quotes from them on your website. Is it what you expected? Were you surprised?

We were very ambitious, I would say <laughs>. After the People Make Games video, PAX Unplugged invited us. We wanted to do something even bigger, but we settled with having eight concurrent tables hosted. We were super stretched. Yeah, we should have thought a bit more deeply about it. At some times, we had just one game master running the eight tables concurrently. It was so tiring. We ran the games from, I think, 10am to midnight for three days straight.

But we were very surprised by the number of game enthusiasts, and people who do escape rooms and murder mysteries, larpers, even prominent game developers and content creators. They came and tried the game and gave very good reviews. So I was like, Wow! This wasn’t something that you would even expect or think of in Singapore. In our first year, we brought Laboratory of Death to one of the only three board game publishers in Singapore, and then all of them were like, okay, let me get back to you. And they didn’t even know what Jubensha was. It’s a huge difference. In Singapore, there are like three Jubensha shops and three board game publishers, but the two sides never interact.

London is a very diverse place and America is even more diverse. Getting feedback from so many people from all walks of life, like people who’ve tried Jubensha before, people who haven’t; people who make computer games, video games, board games. Going to PAX was one of my most eye-opening experiences.

What are you going to do differently at other conventions, other than having fewer games running simultaneously?

We’ll put in more effort, and invest more in terms of having a game host sit through the entire game with a group. Make it a bit more private, a bit more intimate, like something you would find at a Jubensha cafe. When we first went to PAX Unplugged, we’re like, let’s try to get as many people as possible to try this. Now that more people know about it, we want to set a standard for the experience players should expect. We’re trying to work towards a meaty, juicy, solid experience – what Jubensha actually is rather than a more accessible one.

So was the PAX experience shorter?

It was a bit unconventional, because it didn’t have a script. I know Jubensha means “script murder”, but we took the script element out; players didn’t need to read a script before they started playing because all of their characters lost their memories. There’s still a script but they’re not aware of it, they don’t know what their character did, and by playing they figure out what happened.

In the end, the game duration was about the same, around three hours. I saw on Discord that someone played for four hours. I’m thinking, how did I not kick them out? <laughs> But because there wasn’t a script, the time taken would have been less than if there were one.

So you’re thinking of doing a more conventional Jubensha in future. Will there be a script that players have to read in advance?

Yeah, a more conventional experience, but also one with a standard more comparable to what you’d experience in a Jubensha cafe with a game master.

Did players pay at PAX?

We charged $5 USD per player. It’s way below market rate, because we wanted it to be accessible. But also we didn’t want no shows.

From what I understand, in the US, it’s $40 or $50 per person. I have not played a Jubensha in the UK, unfortunately. I’ve heard from a Chinese friend that she went to a shop in London and played for £90 ($120) per person.

Things are expensive in the UK. £90 is a lot, though. How long was that? Two hours?

No, that was six or seven hours.

Six hours! Damn. Well, £90 pounds is a pretty good deal.

Really? Because in Singapore I’ll play for six or seven hours and pay like $40 SGD [£23 / $30 USD].

And you have a host there the whole time?

Yeah.

It’s the rent and the wage cost. Maybe they have fewer customers in London. If you don’t have that many people coming, the cash flow is uneven.

I actually think it’s quite popular among the Chinese diaspora in the UK. I don’t see it on the usual English websites, but on Chinese social media they talk about it quite often.

That makes sense, there’s tons of Chinese students in the UK and they have plenty of money <laughs>. Have you had any publishers from the US or Europe interested in your games?

Not exactly publishing for us in English, but rather they want to publish with us, to distribute and localize games in their languages. That’s something we’re looking out for. But in English, so far I think people would buy directly from us.

I’m really impressed that you’re doing this all in your spare time. It’s a lot of work. And it’s just the two of you?

It is. The two of us just wanted to become game creators but didn’t expect it to be so “businessy”, having to handle so many other things that don’t involve game creation. If we can find someone to do all those things then, of course, we want to invest more time in making Jubensha.

Roughly how many games are you selling?

It’s not great. Basically the highest was at PAX. But afterwards it’s like, in total, maybe just a few hundred. It’s on the lower side.

That’s not bad for something you’re doing in your spare time. That’s pretty good. You don’t have any paid marketing or anything. Obviously you had People Make Games’ coverage, but that’s only one thing. Is it your plan to keep doing this, whether that’s in your spare time or more than your spare time?

Definitely for the foreseeable future. Both of us want to continue creating games. We have so many more ideas in our notepad that we want to make a reality. It’s just, how long will this still be a craze? And how long do people still want to play our games? But as long as there’s people interested, we’ll still want to create.

It’s not really a craze in the English speaking world, is it? It’s still at the start. China is a different question, but all my English-speaking game designer friends and larp friends and tabletop role playing game friends have heard of Jubensha. They’re like, this sounds fascinating but how do we even play? It reminds me of the early days of Dungeons and Dragons, where, if you just bought the box you’d be like, how do you even play? So it spreads through conventions and local game groups in person.

When I look at Jubensha from a business point of view and a game design point of view, I think there was an unrealistic expectation that it should grow instantly to the same size in the US and UK as it is in China. TV shows where contestants play Jubensha seem crucial to its popularity, and we don’t really have anything similar. The closest thing would be Traitors, these reality or detective shows. But Traitors is not the same as Jubensha.

People in the UK and China both love detective stories like Sherlock and murder mysteries. Jubensha should be really popular, but it requires a few things to happen simultaneously. Maybe it’s China’s urbanisation that’s the difference. There’s a lot of young people who want to do things together in person and most of America is not quite as urbanised as China or as young as China,

For my final question: You’ve done three games and you had your fourth at PAX. You’re obviously trying to make them better every time. What are you thinking about doing for the next one to make it even better?

We’re thinking of doing a meatier experience, one that really takes longer: five, six, seven hours, where you need to have a game master. Something with more mechanisms involved in the game as well, not just the murder mystery aspect.

But we’re just not sure whether people are ready for this, because players need to know what Jubensha is. Will you be willing to step into a six or seven hour experience if you haven’t done a three hour one, and know that you’re going to like it? That may be an issue.

On your thought about how Western audiences and Chinese-speaking audiences both like murder mystery, from what we’ve heard from other murder mystery creators like box sets kits, they say Westerners, or Europeans, like more cozy murders set in a manor house or a theatre or a dinner party. Jubensha can be a bit more abstract and the settings more different.

You gotta start with the easy stuff.

Yeah.

If you want something to be more accessible in the UK then you do Sherlock. Isn’t he out of copyright now? Or Agatha Christie.

There’s a Jubensha game where players start out as farmyard animals, then they realise they’re all children with leukaemia. It’s pretty high concept. You just can’t start with that. I mean, it’s really cool. But you need to do all the obvious stuff first. You’re asking people to do something they’ve never done before, so how do you make every other part of it feel as comfortable as possible? So it’s Sherlock, or it’s a traditional cop thing. It’s not too grisly. It’s a bit shorter.

You’re in a difficult situation even with that People Make Games video. You’re trying to make a market appear. It does seem like having a host who knows what they’re doing is really important. You can’t just be like, “Here’s a box, go!”. You need someone who already really understands it, and for that you probably need to spread through conventions or gaming groups or a really good Youtube series.

That’s the other obvious strategy, partnering with YouTube creators where you create a game and they make a really good video of them playing.

On the bright side, Netflix has picked up Crime Scene, the Korean [murder mystery] show. So I don’t know if that’s going global soon.

That would make sense. Yeah, they love that sort of thing.

Something we’re concerned about is that, being the only people creating original English Jubensha from what I understand, there’s just so many licensed or unlicensed translations and games using AI art out there. We’re competing with all these things. I’m not sure if they’re a good or bad thing. People want to try Jubensha, and that’s why they’re reaching out to all of them.