Monthly Archives: January 2016

Looking back at 2015

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It’s the start of a new year and that means it’s time for us to look back and reflect on how we did last year. We did this last year, and for 2013 before that.

Sales overall were up 7% on 2014, and it was our best since 2012. Sales might have been even higher, but for some website problems – more on that below.

Hopefully this trend will continue into 2016, and we will continue to improve our website to make sure that it can be found by the search engines.

Best selling games

Our best selling games for the year were Way out West, followed by Casino Fatale and A Speakeasy Murder.

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Way out West – our best-selling game of 2015

I predicted last year that A Speakeasy Murder would outsell Hollywood Lies, and sure enough that’s exactly what happened. It’s pleasing to see a new game in the top three. And Way out West’s popularity is boosted by it being our free game.

Overall the top three games accounted for 28% of our sales.

New and updated games

In 2015 we published Death on the Rocks and we updated Hollywood Lies.

Website improvements

We also made changes to our website in 2015. The main change was to make the menu more responsive on smaller screens – tablets and phones. This had been on the to-do list for a while, but Google announced last year that it would be prioritising sites that worked well on smaller screens, so we moved it up the to-do list.

Looking at our traffic, it seems that while we get a healthy volume of traffic from smaller screens, purchases tend to be made from laptops or desktop PCs. We believe that our visitors are browsing our site with a mobile device before purchasing a game with their “main” computer.

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A Speakeasy Murder

Website problems

We had two big problems last year. We had a few outages in the first part of the year which led us to change our hosting provider (which is always a challenge). And then in October (the run up to our busiest time of year) our new hosts updated their database software, and that meant we had to update our site.

Our plans for 2015

We set ourselves some goals for 2015. This is how we did:

  • Continuing to improve the website, and keep an eye on its performance: Website improved, performance good but would have been better without the problems described above.
  • Publish Death on the Rocks. Achievement unlocked!
    Update Hollywood Lies: We finally published the updated Hollywood Lies in December. The update took us longer than we though and you can read about that here.
  • Publish our standard rules. Stretch goal reached! We snuck our standard rules into our games last year, and talked about it here.
DotR Group

Death on the Rocks – our new game for 2015

Our plans for 2016

  • Improve the website, again. Maintaining a website is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time you finish, you need to start over. So we still have a few things that need sorting, and we want make it as attractive to visitors as possible.
  • Improve sales by exploring reviews or advertising.
  • Get the free Way out West in front of more people. We think seeing our games is a good selling point, and we’ve got some ideas for that.
  • Update Death on the Gambia and Curse of the Pharaoh. They’re both popular games, but they need an update to the new format.
  • Publish new games if possible. We have some games in the pipeline, but none of them are that close to publication right now. So we’re not making any promises for 2016 (we want to concentrate elsewhere). If it happens, it happens.

Our standard rules

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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.

(Note that we have more rules than this, but these are our most commonly used rules.)Derrenger item card

  • Basic rules – these are our basic rules that apply to all our games.
  • Combat – there are our full combat rules. We use these in a lot of our games – they are quite simple, but can be deadly. These rules include healing and death.
  • Poison – some of our murder mystery games include rules for poisoning others. This is how they work. These rules include healing and death.
  • Capturing another player – sometimes it’s important to be able to capture or restrain another player. This also includes our Arrest rules.

You can find these rules on this page, which also includes some ideas for using the rules.

Rationalising the rules

It’s taken us a while to get to the point where we can publish our standard rules because for a long time they weren’t actually standard. Our games have evolved over time, and we’ve incorporated tweaks and improvements as we’ve gone along. But what we haven’t been very good at is going back and updating the older games.

Poison ability card

Now that we’ve published our standard rules, we’ve gone back to our old games and made sure that they are consistent. After all, we don’t want to confuse anyone with different sets of rules.

The rationalising process has resulted in quite a few discussions here at Freeform Games HQ, as it hasn’t always been obvious which is the best version to use. Our rules for arrests and poison in particularly needed quite a bit of looking at. Overall, however, our approach has been to use the simplest version.

We’re happy with them now, and standardising our rules will make it easier for our future games.

Let us know what you think: have you shared our standard rules with your players? And if so, did it help?