Our murder mystery games are different from many others in many ways, one of which is that our games need a dedicated host. Instead of playing a detective or a suspect along with everyone else, our hosts oversee play and coordinate events and the rules.

I know that some people would like to be able to host their game and play in it, but our games really do need a separate host. We didn’t have to write them that way – so why did we?

With our background in tabletop roleplaying games, it was perhaps inevitable that Mo and I would write games that require a “gamesmaster” role in our games. But that’s because the kind of games and events that we want to write about require such a thing. They can’t easily be done without a dedicated host.

So here, in no particular order, are just some of the reasons our games require a dedicated host:

• There’s no need to worry about inadvertently reading a game secret when you print out the game. If the host is also a player, then they have to be very careful about what they read, just in case they find out the identity or the murderer or some other piece of key information. (And that’s assuming they resist the temptation to cheat.)
• A dedicated host allows us to introduce rules that require a neutral referee, such as combat and pickpocketing. If we didn’t have a neutral referee we wouldn’t include these rules.
• It’s easier to cast your players if you can see the characters first. The host usually knows most of the players, and can cast accordingly.
• A host can focus on making sure that the party is an overall success, and won’t be distracted by trying to achieve their in-character objectives.
• They can adjudicate on any of the wild and wacky ideas that the players may dream up. This is perhaps one of the most important roles of the host, as our murder mystery games give the players considerable flexibility in how they achieve their goals. Instead of endless, overly complicated rules, the host oversees the game and adjudicates on player requests to ensure that everyone has a good time.

Having said all that, we’ve written before with tips for playing a character and being the host.

But if you want to both host and play our games, then the best solution may be to host one game, and then get a friend to host the next.

First choose the right game!

Our best-selling mystery at this time of year is of course The Night before Christmas. This game, set in a high-class New England family’s hunting lodge, is for 12–15 guests and a host, and we also have 5 free extra characters that you can add in if you need more.

Of course, The Night before Christmas isn’t just for the 24th December – it works well at any time in the run-up to the big day. But if you’re organizing your party after Christmas itself, then you want Dazzled to Death instead! This is basically exactly the same game, but with the specific Christmas theming removed.

Or if you don’t have that many guests, check out Snow Business, our other winter-themed murder mystery – this one is for 10–12 guests, and it’s set in a ski chalet with another murderous family get-together.

We create new games from time to time, and we post Christmas games to our Christmas Murder Mystery Party Games page. So keep an eye on that!

Second, pick the right music!

You want something appropriately festive, but also suiting the period. The Night before Christmas is set in the 1950s, so Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, Judy Garland’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and other classics like Let it Snow!, Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Baby and Sleigh Ride are absolutely perfect.
Snow Business is set in the present day, but in a cheesy Alpine resort, so a selection of more modern Christmas songs would be great – Last Christmas, Do They Know It’s Christmas, All I Want for Christmas is You, Fairytale of New York – that sort of thing. With some Euro dance music mixed in!

Third, serve the right food and drink!

We always recommend our games are accompanied with finger food rather than a sit-down meal, and Christmas nibbles are ideal for this. Here’s a great list of simple but delicious recipes from the BBC.

As for drink, there’s the traditional punch (alcoholic or not), mulled wine, eggnog, and hot chocolate. Here’s a good mixture of those together with some festive cocktails, from the BBC again. And eatingwell.com has a great selection here of non-alcoholic drinks, for everyone to enjoy!

The other important tip is: get planning well in advance! We recommend starting two weeks beforehand, ideally. If you don’t have that long, that’s OK, but you’ll have to be organized: don’t leave it to the last minute before printing out the character booklets!

We at Freeform Games will be on duty throughout the holiday period, here to answer your enquries and help with any problems. But if you follow these tips, everything should go just fine and you and your guests will have a terrific and murderous Christmas party! Do please let us know how it goes…

Death on the Gambia is our oldest game. I wrote it in the mid-90s, before Freeform Games came into being. I can’t exactly remember where the idea for Death on the Gambia came from, but I remember that I created it after I played a massive freeform called Home of the Bold in 1992.

Although Home of the Bold was set in a fantasy world, I realised that if you stripped out the geekiness one could create a game that would both be fun to play and appeal to normal people. And that’s what I set out to do with Death on the Gambia, and in 2001 Mo and I started Freeform Games.

The name is obviously similar to Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, but that’s the only resemblance. I decided to set Death on the Gambia in pre-war 1939 so that I could add lots of international spies, an Indiana Jones character and so on.

Death on the Gambia has changed over the years, as our approach to our murder mystery games has changed:

• The original combat system was much too complicated, and required the players to track “wounds”. If I remember correctly, Mo suggested simplifying it and we threw out the wounds.
• Death on the Gambia originally had epilogues, which were used as part of the debriefing. At the end of the game each player would decide whether they had been successful or not (it was up to them to judge) and based on that they received either a “success” or a “failure” epilogue card, which they would then read out. (Epilogues made it into our second game, Curse of the Pharaoh, but no others. They were too hard to make interesting without being overly repetitive.)
• Originally, ability cards all came as separate cards – and some of our older games are still formatted this way. They also tended to vary per character, with the result that some characters ended up a bit overpowered. Since then we’ve standardised on three abilities per character.
• The host originally played the Captain of the Christabel, which didn’t really work out as we discovered that we needed a more neutral character for our games. (The game still contains tips for being both the host and playing the Captain.)

So that’s the story of Death on the Gambia.

It’s mid-September and we’re already thinking about Halloween, just a few weeks away now.

We’ve got two Halloween-themed party games. The first is Halloween Lies, which is a Halloween-themed version of Hollywood Lies. (The two games are basically the same – just the setting has changed. So if you’ve played Hollywood Lies, you’ve already played Halloween Lies.)

Our other Halloween game is Trick or Treat, which is very different. Trick or Treat is more of a traditional party game – there are no murders. All the players are grouped into teams (monster gangs) and have various spooky-themed challenges: there’s a treasure hunt, a pin-the-wart-on-the-witch contest, a competition to create the best scarecrow, and more. Teams can also create potions with strange effects – such as turning someone into a frog.

In order to succeed, the monster gangs must trade information and items with each other to win. Prizes for the contests can be either treats (we used sweets when we first tested the game) or tricks (which are random, and may be good news or bad).

Trick or Treat takes about 30 minutes to play (and so with briefing and handing out prizes allow for about an hour) which makes it ideal as part of a larger Halloween party.

We’ve written Trick or Treat so that it can be played by children as young as about eight (or even younger if they have a bit of adult help), but it’s suitable for all ages. Certainly when we first tested it we played it with adults.

Click here for a list of all our Halloween murder mystery party games.

In the UK and Australia, the games became known as “freeforms” whilst in the USA they became known as “theater-style larps”. They are often run at games conventions.

Thus Mo and I started Freeform Games, and started bring freeform-style murder mystery parties to the Internet.

The main differences between a Freeform Games freeform and the freeforms run at games conventions are:

• We provide detailed instructions for our hosts as we appreciate that our game might be the first time they have tried this sort of thing.
• Freeforms at games conventions are often steeped in the fantasy or SF genres – it’s not unusual to be playing a vampire or a spaceman or even a vampire spaceman. We try to keep our games fixed in the real world. (Although we have made a couple of exceptions, such as Spellbound and A Heroic Death.)
• We also ensure that our murder mystery games are fairly simple and take no longer than about three hours to play – other freeforms can be quite elaborate and involve dozens of players and take an entire weekend (see my post on The King’s Musketeers).

So when Mo and I talked about starting a business bringing murder-mystery style freeforms to the Internet, “Freeform Games” just seemed to be perfect.

There are perhaps two downsides to calling ourselves Freeform Games. The first is that the name itself doesn’t mean anything very much, particularly if you aren’t involved in freeforming. Second, and probably more importantly, it’s not a particularly good name from Google’s perspective, as it doesn’t contain the words “murder mystery”.

Despite those two drawbacks, I can’t imagine being called anything other than Freeform Games. It suits us just right.