Help with "finding a place" mechanic

A rather elobarote idea would be for the murder to place tiles on the board after a murder, some fake one and one with a body on it. Then players have several options where to go, and they might deduce wich tile is the body by knowing where the murder should approximately be, or by getting some circumstancial information from witnesses.

Hope it helps?

Ah, right, I understand better now, I was thinking more like scotland yard style where you co-op against one killer.
But you want more a co-op puzzle solving game? All detectives and no killer.

I don't think that's possible, atleast not in my mind, since you want the players to follow a trail from B (the place the body was found) to A (the place the murder took place). But in order for players to follow such a trail the trail has to be logically set-up from place A to B, you cannot do this if A is unknown by everyone.

I really think you need an outside player who sets-up the board or an opposite player, or you just turn the game into randomness and luck.

Well you could randomnize it and put some luck into it.

For instance, you have 3 murder scenes, you shuffle each chit with a murder scene with 2 (or more) additinal chits that directly relate to the murder scene. Then shuffle each chit of this shuffle again with 2 (or more) chits that points to a direct evidence of where the murder scene should be, repeat again etc.

This way you get several piles of chits wich are all more or less connected to the murder scene, you can now place those tile sets next too each other or randomly and have a more or less accurate way of tracing to the murder scene.

That's about the best I could come up with.

This may not help you, but from reading your post I remembered a mechanic I deviced once. It was for a boardgame based on the Tropico videogame theme. All players were advisors of El Presidente (a caribbean Dictator), and they have to capture "imperialist agents" to gain his favor. So they went around breaking into houses, interrogating random people, profiling people in their work and stuff, to get clues about a possible rebel subject. They just needed a complete set of "proofs" to nail someone for good.

So, what I'm trying to say if that you can start without knowing who the murderer was, but you have a limited number of suspects. You put (like) 7 evidences in a deck and have the players draw from it. The first getting the 7 evidences solves the case. There is a lot more to it, but you can figure out the rest.

Keep thinking!

Here's a basic mechanic you can use as an inspiration for something that suits the rest of the game better. I might use this or something similar in a game of mine, but it's ok even if you want to use it as is:

You have a deck of cards/tiles that you will distribute face down on the table to form the game board (or on several spaces on top of the board, your pick).

For each body you have 1 card/tile and 4 hint cards/tiles. Then there is a bunch of neutral cards (probably something like 8 neutral cards per body).

For the setup you sort the deck as groups of N-N-N-N-H-H-B-H-H-N-N-N-N. Then you do a bit of overhand shuffling, though not too much and no riffle or pile shuffling, because you want only a bit of randomization, but you don't want to totally break all the H-H-B-H-H packs.

Finally, you deal the cards face down on the table/board, row after row, column after column, or in a spiral, or even in a complex worm-like shape. Just make sure that at least most of the time you're placing the cards next to each other in deck order.

That means most of the Hint cards will probably end next to the corresponding body. Then the players can go looking for clues (turning cards face up) in search of the hints and bodies. Most times a hint will mean the body is nearby, but some times the hint will lead to nothing (when the hint card was moved away from the body during shuffling).

You can even have two (or more) levels of hints, and set up the deck as N-N-N-N-H1-H2-B-H2-H1-N-N-N-N. That way the Hint2 cards, being closer to the Body, are less likely to lead to a dead end than the Hint1 cards.

You can have specific Hint cards for each body, if finding a specific body is important in the game, or just identical hints for all, if you only care about finding any body.

I hope this helps you.