We have received a great story from Rosie about her Way out West Zoom party.
I ran Way out West via zoom for a group of old school friends last weekend and it was so much fun! The players said it was one of the best evenings they’ve had all year.
I wrote one extra character. My husband played it and said it worked really well- in fact he got quite a few murder accusations (is that a mark of success?!)
(I wrote the character so that it could be played by male or female as I’ve noticed there seem to be fewer female parts in the murder mysteries I’ve seen- but then saw you’d given the stable hand a name already so he is Pete.)
Zoom worked pretty well as a medium, I only have the basic account so we had to restart the call every 40 minutes which wasn’t as annoying as it sounded as the game broke fairly neatly into 40 min chunks. A word of advice to others to check out their breakout room settings- they need to tick the box to allow players to exit breakout rooms themselves!
Thanks for a lovely evening.
You can now download Rose’s extra character, stable hand Jay Sidwell, with the other extra characters in the same place you download the main files.
Her note about gender balance is interesting – we try to be even in the genders across our games and include a good number of genderless characters to keep things flexible, obviously we can always do better.
In fact originally her character, the stable hand, was male. That’s because the stable hand, Pete, is mentioned once in Way out West – they’re the poor soul who finds Zeke’s body. So we’ve changed Pete to Jay and made them genderless.
Way out West now has three extra characters, and you can see the full list of extra characters for all our games here.
Hello, I purchased Way Out West a few years ago and the long blog post on this web page (https://www.freeformgames.com/blog/additional-way-out-west-character-and-zoom-tips/page/2/?et_blog) about an extra character, Jay, says there are 3 extra characters above the 24, but I only have Alex Gables. The link to “the full list of extra characters for all our games” only lists Alex. I am about to run a WoW party on Jan 31 and it’s so popular that I could really use the extra 2 characters. Thank you!
Hi Rich, thanks for this question! We removed the other two extra characters from Way out West when we did our most recent revision of it, in 2023 – so now there only is the one that you’ve seen, Alex Gables.
But we do still have them on file – so if anyone needs them, they can get in touch with us via our contact form or email address, and we’ll be happy to send them along.