After a murder mystery party we like to get feedback from our players. We primarily do this to improve our games, but I’ve started asking for stories. As well as celebrating the party’s success, stories are the only way I get to discover what happened. (As host, I am often the last person to find out what’s going on.) Post-party feedback So after...
In our last post, Mark R told us about Kumospace, a spacial chat app he used to host Death in Venice. So I thought I’d try it out and successfully ran Reunion with Death using Kumospace. Reunion with Death on Kumospace - the pop-out map showing the whole floor is on the right So here are my tips for using Kumospace: Names: Ask everyone to change...
Mark R recently wrote to tell us about Kumospace. In Mark’s words… We did Reunion with Death back in 2020 using Zoom. The game was great, but Zoom is a bit clunky since the host must admit people to rooms. Kumospace layout I just bought Death in Venice. I'll use a different service this time: Kumospace. I haven't used it yet (other than to play...
Our murder mystery games require a separate host because we include items and money and abilities like pickpocketing and rules such as combat and arrests. We find a dedicated host helps the game run smoothly. However, the games we developed during lockdown (Reunion with Death and Death in Venice) are more straightforward because we designed them...
We’ve recently updated Happy Birthday R.J. to our latest format. Happy Birthday R.J. was originally published in 2003. It was our fifth game and was written by Lisa Butler (who later wrote Snow Business and Casino Fatale). Next year it celebrates its 20th birthday! Taking place on SouthSpoon Ranch in 1980s Texas, Happy Birthday R.J. is full of...
One of of our customers recently wrote to us asking which games have combat in them.
We realised we hadn’t made it easy for our customers to work out which games have combat and which ones don’t, so we have added icons to each games’ page to make that clear.
As you might expect, the pandemic dominated 2021 for Freeform Games, but we slowly started to recover from 2020.We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – you can read them all here. Online and offline play While 2020 showed a strong interest in playing our games online (using Zoom or similar), in 2021 we sold fewer copies of our online games...
We were recently asked how we would add around 20 additional characters to Hollywood Lies. That’s a lot, and as we’ve already talked about that for Casino Fatale, I thought I’d explain what I would do for Hollywood Lies. Hollywood Lies starts with 32 characters, and there are two additional characters. So an additional 20 characters means you...
We’ve just updated The Night Before Christmas into our current format. Written by Tracy Bose and initially published in 2004, we haven’t significantly updated the game in over a decade and it needed a reformat. Reformatting So while we haven’t changed the plots or characters, we’ve made numerous changes: The characters are now in the 8-page...
Following on from our birthday post last month, I thought it would be interesting to show when we published each game. I’ve excluded translations to keep things simple… 2001 Death on the Gambia by Steve Hatherley 2002 Murder at Sea by Chris Boote (Murder at Sea was originally All at Sea, we later changed its name) Curse of the Pharaoh by Mo...