I recently played in UK Freeform’s annual weekend game. Last year it was Cafe Casablanca (Mo played and I helped run it). The year before we both played in The King’s Musketeers. And this year it was Lullaby of Broadway: Into the Woods. As you might guess by the title, Lullaby of Broadway: Into the Woods was based on Broadway musicals - lots of...
So it’s that time of year again when we look back at the past twelve months and review how we did. We did this for 2013, and now it’s time for 2014. Sales overall - a bit flat 2014 was overall a bit flat for us - a rise of just over 1%. However, that figure hides quite a bit of good news, as although the first few months were generally very bad,...
Second in our occasional author profiles, this time it's the turn of Becky Channon - author of A Heroic Death and A Speakeasy Murder. Becky grew up in London, England, and (mis)spent her youth writing comic short stories with her brother. Much later, her brother asked her to write him a funny superhero-themed murder mystery party for his upcoming...
When is the best time to end a murder mystery game? We provide a timetable with all our games, covering the murder mystery party in detail. The timetable typically includes the briefing, key events (such as when clues are released), the point at which characters can die (for those games that involve fighting), and the end of the game. Casino...
Despite the best laid plans, sometimes real life intervenes and a guest or two may turn up late to your murder mystery party. Here are some ideas for how you can deal with latecomers. Unplanned latecomers The worst situation is when you don’t find out that someone will be late until they don’t turn up on time. In this situation I would delay the...
Back on 20th July we ran a playtest of our new game Death on the Rocks, in London. Playtesting is an important part of our development process. However well a murder mystery game’s been written and edited, it can’t be considered finished until it’s been thoroughly tested. We call it ‘playtesting’ because it takes the form of playing through the...
Note - this is a thought experiment for experienced hosts and players. I've yet to try this out - so I don't know if it works. There’s a style of freeform/larp known as a “horde” game. These normally involve six to eight “core” characters and typically dozens of smaller roles. The players playing the fixed characters stay with those characters...
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...
Back in April Mo and I attended the Peaky 2014 freeform writing weekend. (I wrote about that last year.) This year Mo and I both pushed boundaries – his group took his idea from last year (“What Happened in Blackpool/Picking up the pieces”) and expanded upon it to create a version (currently unnamed) that works for up to 40 players! (They tested...
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...