This is an improv game, by Keith Johnstone. It's great.

One player mimes being hauled in by an invisible monster. The "monster" (who is called Boris) forces him into a chair to be interrogated.

The other players are the interrogators. They must fire random questions at the victim about his crime. It's important that these are completely random questions - "What about the goldfish?" or "Why was there a jar of Marmite at the scene?" - and they're fired really, really fast. The job of the victim is to answer all these questions and try to make sense of them.

Interrogator: "Where is the money?"
Victim: "It's at the train station."
Interrogator: "What about the goldfish?"
Victim: "He helped me steal it. He swam into the bank vault."
Interrogator: "And the blue trousers?"
Victim: "Camoflage, so no-one could see me when the vault was flooded with water."
Interrogator: "Who is 'Paul'?"
Victim: "The bank manager."
Interrogator: "And the number 9556?"
Victim: "His phone number."

If the Interrogators are dissatisfied with the Victim's answers, they should tell Boris to help 'persuade' the victim.

Interrogator: "Boris, help him!"
Victim: "Aaaargh!" [mimes Boris twisting his arm]

Finally, the Interrogators should summarise the Victim's story.

Interrogator: "So, you're telling me that you called the bank manager, Paul. You threatened to kill his pet budgie, Gerald, unless he opened the vault. Once open, goblins armed with water pistols flooded the vault. You waded in, in blue trousers, and released the safe-cracking goldfish, who opened the safety deposit box. You fled with the Diamonds of Bulgar."
Victim: "It's the truth, I swear."
Interrogator: "All right. You may go."

The story produced will usually be fantastical, and perhaps childish, but will make some logical sense.

The point of this game, in case you're wondering, is to get the Victim into a creative mindset. It doesn't matter if the story makes any sense, as long as the Victim is responding immediately, without thinking, giving the first answer that occurs to him. Often, these "obvious" answers will appear to be amazingly creative, even though the Victim didn't put any conscious thought into them. The quickfire questioning, and the torture of "Boris", are designed to stop the Victim thinking about his answers.

Graham

Building situation through torture since 2006!  You coul totally build a "usual suspects" flashback game building off this technique.

I'm super excited about what improv has to teach us - I wasn't aware that there was a whole body of theory behind it, or that there was such an enormous library of exercises.  In our first class Clinton, Remi and I were all nodding sagely to one another every few minutes - "Oh hells yeah, I am so stealing that"...

That's actually the way Mexican Standoff works, more or less. Players basically accuse one another of doing something wrong on the heist, and the answering player must make up some reason for why what happened happened, before doing the same to someone else.

Player A: "B, why wasn't the car at the pick-up point, it was your job to drive the car to the spot?!?"

Player B: "Why are you blaming me? I was there, you all were late! Then the cops showed up and I had to split. I called C, and he told me to head for the corner of 5th and central. C?"

Player C: "And we could have all gotten away, if D, hadn't stop for that damn hotdog!..."

And so on...

Jason wrote:
Building situation through torture since 2006!  You coul totally build a "usual suspects" flashback game building off this technique.

I'm super excited about what improv has to teach us - I wasn't aware that there was a whole body of theory behind it, or that there was such an enormous library of exercises.  In our first class Clinton, Remi and I were all nodding sagely to one another every few minutes - "Oh hells yeah, I am so stealing that"...