Freeform Games murder mystery blog

Hollywood Lies – actual play!

So what does a Freeform Games murder mystery party really look like? They're hard to describe, and if you've not seen or played in one, they're fairly hard to imagine. So here's a moment from Hollywood Lies, sent to us by Julie D'Augusta. In this scene, Jules Milton is being thrown out from the Post-Modern Freeform Movement (one of many plots in...

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Investigating Pickpocket Crimes

Pickpocketing can be a divisive mechanic amongst experienced freeformers (although I’ve never heard any of our customers complain about it). On one hand it’s a useful mechanic for replicating a real-life skill (one that is thankfully rare); on the other hand it can be particularly demoralising to have spent all game trying to get hold of...

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Big Money

I experimented recently with printing our money at approximately life-size, and it looks really good -  and feels much more like money. This experiment was inspired by the photograph above from Way out West. Sent to us by Jaqui French, I was intrigued by the dollar bills. Those look like the graphics from our money cards, but printed extra...

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Looking back at 2018

It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We’ve been doing this since 2013. Hollywood Lies 2018 was our best year so far in terms of sales. We sold 28% more games on 2017, and we finally beat our 2011 previous best. No doubt the drop in the exchange rate has helped us there -...

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Never too old to learn new tricks

The recent playtests for The Reality is Murder worked really well. We asked for playtesters via our newsletter, and eventually had four groups providing us with great feedback that really improved the game and ironed out a few kinks that we hadn’t spotted. And even though we have been writing and publishing these games for nearly 20 years, I’m...

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Looking back at 2017

It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We’ve been doing this since 2013. 2017 was pretty successful for us in terms of sales, as we were slightly up on 2016 sales, although 2011 still reigns supreme. However, in terms of things that we planned to do… that’s a different...

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“Best” Murder Mystery Parties

Here's a roundup of murder mystery party games by Hexagamers. They’ve taken a good long look at the various murder mystery companies that you can find on the internet and are trying them out to judge which really are the best. Happily, we’re in the list - but they have yet to try one of our games. We’re looking forward to their feedback when they...

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From our mailbox: twins

Recently we were asked a question about having two people play the same character. (It might have been a mixup, and by the sounds of it the game was oversubscribed.) Our answer was that while it was tricky, it was doable - particularly with the character she had chosen. What we recommended was to make the characters twins. To do this: Give each...

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