The Sixth Floor, in the Public Record

Before a single puzzle is sketched, the room is given its hardest constraint: everything in it must trace back to a named document. So the first exhibit we assembled was not an artefact at all. It was a ledger of what the public record actually establishes about the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository — and, just as important, what it does not.

What the record establishes

The building itself is settled ground. The Texas School Book Depository was a seven-story brick warehouse overlooking Dealey Plaza in Dallas. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy's motorcade passed the building shortly after noon. Shots were fired. One of the building's employees, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had begun work there as an order filler in mid-October, left the premises minutes afterward and was arrested later that day in connection with the shooting of a Dallas police officer.

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy — the Warren Commission — reported in September 1964. Its conclusion: the shots that struck the President were fired from the sixth floor's southeast corner window. That window, that floor, and that date are the anchors of our room, and they are not in dispute in the record.

What the room is allowed to do with it

Everything physical in the game — the crate stacks, the order paperwork, the clock, the view from the window bay — is reconstructed to match the documented layout of that floor as the record describes it. Puzzles resolve to dated, citable events: a document read at the right moment, a timestamp matched to a movement, a sequence put back in the order the record gives it.

The wider questions — motive, certainty, every argument that has followed the Commission's report — are not hidden. They are simply never presented as fact. Where the record speaks, the room speaks with it. Where the record stops, the room stops with it and labels the gap as a gap.

Why this matters for play

A room built this way teaches without trying to. Players leave knowing the sequence of November 22, 1963 — not because a narrator told them, but because they assembled it themselves, under sixty minutes of pressure, from the same sources any researcher can pull today. That is the whole pitch: history you solve, cited as you go.