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Case file 010 · Premium · 1981 · Atlantic City, New Jersey

The Last Arcade

A penny arcade worth $2.1 million, a locked token room, and three keys.

▶ Play this case$9.99, or all cases from $6.99/week24 documents · 6 suspects · 2–3 hours · no hints

The case

Saturday night, 12 September 1981. Three years into legal gambling, the Boardwalk is being bought up parcel by parcel. Frankie Amato, 61, has run Amato's Playland at Tennessee Avenue since 1949 and has refused $2.1 million from the developer who owns everything on either side of him.

At 02:20 Sunday the night manager finds him in the token room with his head broken and the Saturday take gone. The police say robbery. The token room was locked from outside with a Medeco key that only three people carry, and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola stands on the office desk beside a second chair.

A nephew who would inherit, a developer's fixer, a night manager accused of skimming, a daughter cut out of the will, a rival who gets paid when the block is assembled, and a banned drifter with two priors. A casino camera, a telephone company, a rolling-chair operator, a jitney association and a railroad conductor know where each of them was.

What is in the file

What you must do

Read all 24 documents and name the person who killed Frankie Amato. One accusation. Right or wrong, the solution file opens and shows every document that convicts. There are no hints and nothing is marked.

Play it with friends

Press play and choose Create a room. Up to eight of you read the file on your own phones, see what the others have opened, vote in secret and let the host reveal. Only the host needs to own the case; guests play free.

Fiction notice. Atlantic City, New Jersey as described here, and every person in this file, are invented. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.

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