Cape May's War of the Worlds

October 2010

The War of the Worlds has always struck me as a great story, a great situation to drop mystery guests into. Drawing material from the 1898 novel, the 1938 radio broadcast and the 1953 film, we wove the tale of a Martian cylinder that had been downed over Cape May in the first wave of the Great Invasion. Our guests could choose to be invading Martians or defending Earthlings.

Our murder "victims" were actually Martian scouts trying to locate the cylinder which carried medical supplies that would have given the invaders a strong resistance to earth's bacteria. Martian medical pods were in three hidden locations south of the canal and if the Martians recovered two of the three the invasion succeeded.

The Martians got off to a fast start but Earth's defenders just barely edged them out and saved the planet. It was a fun problem for the guests to grapple with and one day we'll surely run it again!