We've just tweaked Pirate Island so that it now works with up to 32 pirates. I'm going to explain the how and the why of doing that. The why Pirate Island had been bugging me for a while - because it's actually a bit fiddly to prepare. Scout Master Richard running Pirate Island - and on his 50th birthday as well! Pirate Island is a team game,...
We use some standard rules in our murder mystery games to cover situations such as combat, poisoning, death and the like. We’ve now made these available in pdf form so that you can share them with your players.
In Part 1 I talked about updating Hollywood Lies - bringing it into the modern format, making it completely kid-friendly, making all the characters gender-neutral, and including the extra character pack in the main game. In this post I talk about how I did it. Preparing the character booklets Detective Chase (right) investigates the murder. The...
So for much of 2015 I have been spending my spare time updating Hollywood Lies and bringing it into our current format. We finally released it in early December.As well as re-formatting it (to bring it up to our current standard, as I had done recently with Murder at Sea), we had a few other ideas for developing Hollywood Lies: To make Hollywood...
As part of this year’s Hollywood Lies update, one of the changes I have made was to the murder plot. The original murder plot involved a love affair, and that was no longer appropriate as I was making the game more kid-friendly and gender neutral. So this is what I did. Plotting a murder The first thing I needed to do was work out the basic plot...
As I mentioned in our review of 2014, I am updating Hollywood Lies and bringing it into our current format. However, one of the things that it making this harder (and therefore taking much more time than it otherwise should), is that I am making all the characters gender-neutral so that they can be played by men or women. Hollywood Lies - our...
First class passengers enjoying Murder at Sea All at Sea was our second murder mystery game and is written by Chris Boote. Apart from amending a couple of errors we haven't really touched it at all since its release in 2002. However, since then we’ve changed our game layout (more than once!) and as All at Sea is one of our more popular games, we...
We love getting feedback. Our favourites are the unsolicited emails we get telling us about your parties, but sometimes we send out our feedback form. In March we did just that and sent out 1200 feedback requests to our most recent purchasers of our games. Actually, when I say we’ve got them back, we only received 11 responses. We think a lot of...
Our murder mystery games include tips for beginners to help them get started. There are always two tips, each one suggesting that the player go and talk to another player about something. We include tips for beginners for two primary reasons: First (and most importantly), the tips give a new player some idea of how our games are played. If you're...
Sometimes we are asked about expanding our murder mysteries to include many more characters than we had originally written. Now, if you need just one or two extra characters, you can use the free extra characters that we and other customers have written for the games. Or you could write your own (and if you send that character back to us and we...