Looking back at 2025

It’s 2026! Already! So how was 2025 for Freeform Games?

In summary, we published more games (yay!), but sales were flat (hmmm).

We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – read them here.

Best-selling games

Our bestsellers in 2025 were our usual suspects, in order: Way out West, Casino Fatale, A Will to Murder and A Speakeasy Murder.

However, overall, sales were pretty flat. That’s a little disappointing, as we like to see a little growth. Maybe this year.

In terms of our German and French partners, the German bestseller was Hollywoods Lügen (based on Hollywood Lies) and the Frnech besteller was Réunion Mortelle (based on Reunion with Death)

Curiously, the German bestsellers tend to be our larger games, while the French bestsellers are generally smaller. (That was the same last year.)

New and updated games

We started the year by updating Court in the Act, which was the last game in our old format (without character booklets).

We published three new games in 2026: The Show Must Go On (a short game that takes no longer than an hour to play in total), Death at the Derby (a large, complex game), and The Kiss of Death (a smaller game).

Goals for 2025

At the start of 2025, we set ourselves a few goals. How did we do?

• Update Court in the Act: Complete! We published Court in the Act in the first part of 2025.
• Quarterly newsletter: Done. In 2025, we turned our irregular newsletter into a more regular quarterly newsletter. Given the vagaries of social media, it’s the best way to keep in touch with us. You can subscribe and read past newsletters here.
• Website: There’s always work to be done on the website. In 2025, it was largely about performance and technical things like caching, CDNs, and other mysterious acronyms we never thought we would need to know about. Done!
• Publish two new games: As discussed above, we actually published three games, so we overdelivered!

Our goals for 2026

We’ve got three goals for 2026.

First, we’re going to publish three new games. A Haunting in Hartwick is currently out for playtesting. Assuming there’s nothing wrong with it, then we expect to publish it before Easter.

The other two games that we’re pretty confident about are A Fatal Theory (which we’re preparing for our internal playtest; if that goes well, look for another call for playtesters before too long), and The Deadly Library (which is still being put together, but which is likely to be ready for playtesting in the summer).

Another game might beat The Deadly Library to publication, but I’m pretty sure 2026 will see three new games from us.

Better socials: We admit it, we’re rubbish at social media. It’s something neither of us likes doing… So this year we have some help – expect us to be more active on social media.

Keep working on the website: Running a website is a never-ending job. There’s always something that could be better.

Summary

Overall, 2025 was a good year for us, as we accomplished everything we set out to do. And while we didn’t see spectacular growth, at least sales didn’t slip backwards!

Here’s to 2026!