Monthly Archives: May 2020

Death in Venice – an online murder mystery for lockdown

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We’ve just released another game specifically designed to be played online during this unprecedented lockdown – Death in Venice.

Death in Venice is for 5-9 players (and one host) and is again designed to be played using video chat (Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever your favourite is).

Last night at the glamorous Venice Film Festival, controversial award-winning director Clay McFarland was dead in front of St Mark’s Cathedral – hacked to death with a meat cleaver.

Clay’s movie, Never Look Back, won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award last night. After the post-awards party, the cast and crew and their guests returned to the Casanova, the luxury yacht they are using for the festival. All except Clay, who remained behind – and who never returned.

Everyone now is confined to their cabins aboard the Casanova, while the police start their investigation. The only way they can communicate is online.

As cathedral bells toll out across the ancient city, on board the Casanova a frothy ferment of vineyards, memoirs, gossip, jealousy, and movie-set punch-ups will come to the boil.

Charge your glasses, put on your designer sunglasses, and and join the cast and crew of Never Look Back as they try to solve the mystery of death in Venice!

Learn more about Death in Venice here.

A Heroic Death in Lockdown

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A Heroic Death is one of our more complex games in terms of moving parts – it has superpowers and hidden identities and specific locations. So we never thought it would be a candidate for online play during coronavirus lockdown.

How wrong we were!

Eve Bennett successfully ran A Heroic Death with her friends spread across three cities, two in France and one in the UK (and with seven different nationalities, so a real international mix).

Technical stuff – Zoom, Slack and a dedicated app

Here’s Eve:

“Similarly to what someone described in a previous blog of yours, we used Zoom, but we used the breakout rooms function to represent the different rooms in the superheroes’ base (according to the plan provided with the game).

“So players could go to different rooms to have private conversations. For the items and abilities, my partner (who’s handily a software engineer) created an app that functioned as a virtual wallet for each player (see photo).

Virtual wallet

“We also set up a private channel on Slack (see example below) for each player with them and us, the two hosts, which they used to tell us when they wanted to move to a different room or use an item or ability or get stuff from, or leave stuff in, one of the bedrooms.

“Here’s the document that we sent to the players to explain all the virtual game mechanics in full.” (Note – this is an MS Word document that will download if you click on it.)

I believe that Zoom’s breakout rooms function is only available with the paid version – but if you are technically minded there are other options such as Discord.

So how did it go?

“It was a really great evening and everyone has been telling us how much they loved it and how it was the most fun they’d had in weeks.

“However, it was pretty hectic for us hosts, even with two of us! It’s a shame that the players had to rely on us to move them to different rooms as it was hard to keep on top of that as well as the items, abilities, hangover cures, etc. But we managed, more or less!”

Eve did later say that if she were doing it again she would set the game space up using lots of Google Hangouts (as Peal described previously) as using Zoom meant that the hosts had to move everyone in and out of the breakout rooms.

“In this photo you can see all the participants. You can probably guess who’s who, but just in case, from left to right…

  • Top row: Hosts 1 & 2 (we went for a Red Dwarf reference as the Host is supposed to be a hologram!), Miguel (in his cleaning supplies cupboard), InvisoGirl.
  • Second row: Shaman, Puss, Bloody Mary (actual bloody mary made with passata as she couldn’t find tomato juice not pictured), Ice Queen.
  • Third row: Masked Crusader, WhizzoGirl (who kept styling her hair and reapplying makeup throughout), Doctor Robot (Head and) Neck, S.
  • Bottom row: The Russian, Captain Amazing! (underpants over tights not pictured, but we did catch a glimpse at one point!).

“I’d told everyone not to worry too much about costumes, but as you can see they made an amazing effort in the circumstances!

“So thank you very much to all at Freeform Games for keeping us thoroughly entertained for an evening (and longer in the case of us hosts)!”

Decorating your venue – lockdown style!

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One of our customers, Peal, got in touch with us recently to share with us a site they had prepared for lockdown Murder at Sea with 20 guests.

We’re really impressed – it’s a great way to set the scene for your online murder mystery party.

They built their site using Google sites. I’m not sure if they used one of the templates or if they built it from scratch (possibly the Event template). Other free website builders are available.

Murder at Sea – Home page

This is the home page. They’ve used an image of a suitable liner and included our introductory text from the game. They also included a couple of checklists.

Before the Party Checklist

  • Read your character description and (if possible) print out your abilities.
  • Read the rules to understand how to use items and abilities.
  • Ensure Zoom is working on your computer (Phones may be hard)
  • Ensure Google Hangouts is working on your computer.
  • You can check this by going to the map page and clicking one of the rooms in the ship.

On the Day

  • Reread your character details again!
  • Do you have?
    • Booze
    • Food/Snacks
    • A snazzy outfit and your character prepped
    • Phone and Laptop Charger

Then head on over to The Great Staircase and join the Zoom Meeting
(Murder at Sea starts with the lights going out and Captain Bayard being shot – I don’t know how they staged that.)

The map

This page contains the locations where the game will be played. The Great Staircase is the main Zoom location – that’s where the party will start. (Note that Zoom has a 40 minute time limit if you don’t have the paid version. Jitsi is a free alternative, but lacks some of the features that Zoom has.)

The other 11 locations (The Dining Room, a First Class Cabin, an Empty Deck and so on) are all Google Hangouts that the players can use to have private conversations.

(I’ve explained how you can set up Google Hangouts in this way at the bottom of the page.)

Character Details

On this page, everyone can get access to the information about their character.

Cast List

This is our cast list – it’s our cast list pdf embedded in the page.

So for example, clicking on Christina Younger takes you to the page below:

The three links on this page (Items, Abilities, Character Description) all go to protected Google Drive folders that the host has set up. Access has been shared with the relevant player only, so only they have access.

You could also use Dropbox or OneDrive – or ownDrive as one of our other customers recently described here.

Zoom Backgrounds

Zoom lets you add a virtual background to your calls, so rather than seeing your normal background you appear to be somewhere more appropriate.

So here the host found (and created) lots of thematic image files (.pngs) for their players to use.

Here are some examples of images – one of an Edwardian room and the other a background for one of the characters – this one for Elizabeth James with the Union Jack.

There were even animated angel wings, presumably for characters who had died during the game.

Rules

The final page, Rules, has links to our standard rules for poison, pickpocketing and so on. 

Google Hangouts

Here’s how you can set up a video call that people can just drop into and out of.

1 – go to https://hangouts.google.com/

2 – In the middle of the screen you should see: 

3 Click on “Video Call”

4 You will get a new pop-up with the video call. You’ll also get a dialogue box like this – just close it by clicking the X in the top right corner.

5 You’re now in a video call, all alone.

6 Copy the URL of the call, which will look like “https://hangouts.google.com/call/…” and then a random list of letters and numbers.

7 Save that URL somewhere. Anyone can then click on that URL and go straight into your video call. (And I mean anyone, so be careful about making it too public!)

8 Set up several hangouts – and give them appropriate names such as “On deck” or “At the bar” or “Under the gazebo”.