Looking back at 2018

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It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We’ve been doing this since 2013.

Hollywood Lies - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — Hollywood Lies

2018 was our best year so far in terms of sales. We sold 28% more games on 2017, and we finally beat our 2011 previous best. No doubt the drop in the exchange rate has helped us there – we’ve never raised our prices in the nearly 17 years we’ve been trading.

However, in terms of things that we planned to do… well, let’s see.

Bestselling games

Our best selling games for the year were Way out West, followed by A Will to Murder and A Speakeasy Murder. Clearly our policy of giving away Way out West (or at least, the 10 player version of it) is still working as this isn’t the first time it’s been our best-seller.

Overall our top three games accounted for 28% of our sales (similar to last year).

New and updated games

We finally published The Reality is Murder in 2018. This has been brewing for a while, and Steve is a bit ashamed at how long it has taken to get this far. But now that’s it’s finished, we’re really happy with it.

Murder at Sea - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — ***Murder at Sea***

Freeformgames.com

In 2018 we removed the discussion forums from the site. They weren’t much used, and they were a target for spam. This meant that they required much more maintenance than we were comfortable with.

So we went through the forum and harvested all the great tips and advice and added that to a new set of hints and tips pages. Hopefully these are easier to use than the forum, and if you have a tip of your own please do send it to us via our Contact Us page.

What about our plans for 2018?

Way out West - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — ***Way out West***

We set ourselves some goals for 2018. This is how we did:

Improve our website: While we did remove the discussion forum, we didn’t restructure freeformgames.com to make it simpler and more intuitive. We started the planning for that, but we didn’t actually implement any of the changes. At least, not yet.
Publish The Food is to Die For: We hoped that this would be ready for 2018, but sadly didn’t make it.
Publish The Reality is Murder: Success – we published The Reality is Murder in October 2018.
Publish Murder on the Istanbul Express: Again, we hoped this would be ready for 2018, but we didn’t make it in time.

So of our four goals we one solid success and one partial success (improving the website). We failed our other two goals.

Plans for 2019

Our plans for 2019:

Improve our website: We’ve started the planning for improving the website to make it easier to navigate, and in 2019 we’ll make those changes. (Although we’ve been saying that for a couple of years now – we need to make it happen instead of just talking about it.)
Publish The Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express. Both are very close and just need pushing over the line.
Update Under the Big Top or Happy Birthday RJ. Both of these games are still in their original format, and need updating to our current format. We haven’t decided which of these to do yet.
Improve our use of Facebook: One of our customers recently asked if we were still in business because we hadn’t updated our Facebook page in over two months. That’s not a good sign, so we’re going to make more use of Facebook in 2019.

Brexit – the big unknown

We’re based in the UK and right now, despite being less than three months away, it’s still not clear how Brexit will affect us. That’s because our Government seems to be more concerned with in-fighting than providing a good deal and clarity for business.

From what we can see so far, our customers won’t see any difference, however there will be some additional administrative burden for us, particularly in relation to dealing with EU VAT (as we will lose access to the one-stop service that we currently enjoy as members of the EU). But as we aren’t reliant on a complicated supply chain, that should be about it.

But as I write it seems that there is still all to play for in Brexit-land, so who knows where we will end up.

TL;DR – 2018 was a great success

So overall, 2018 was a great success for Freeform Games, and we’re hoping we can build on that in 2019.

Court in the Act - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — **Court in the Act**

Never too old to learn new tricks

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The recent playtests for The Reality is Murder worked really well. We asked for playtesters via our newsletter, and eventually had four groups providing us with great feedback that really improved the game and ironed out a few kinks that we hadn’t spotted.

And even though we have been writing and publishing these games for nearly 20 years, I’m still learning new things. So amongst all the specific playtest feedback, there were a couple of issues that appeared that I think we need to carry across to other games.

Missing characters

While we already provide instructions for what to do if some characters aren’t used, it seems that one of our playtesters missed them, and got a bit confused.

So I made the following change: where items are reassigned, I added a handout to be added to the affected character envelope. This should make it clearer as to what needs to be done when not all the characters are being played.

Solving the murder

One of our playtesters noted that towards the end of the mystery some of the characters had finished their goals, and if they had had a goal to solve the murder, could have been working towards that.

I didn’t want to add a goal to every character to tell them to solve the murder because that’s a player objective rather than a character objective. But I realised that the host could remind the players of that objective during the game.

So added a note to the hosts’ introductory speech about solving the murder: “At the end of the evening I will ask everyone to indicate who they think murdered Jeff Thompson. So see if you can piece the evidence together and work out who murdered Jeff, and why.”

I also added an announcement in the timeline (and Quick Reference Sheet) towards the end of the game, reminding everyone to try and identify the murder.

That way the players are reminded that they can still solve the murder, while the characters are still the characters.

Our other games

And with The Reality is Murder finally finished, these changes now need to be added (where applicable!) to our other games.

That’ll be something we do over time as we update our games – starting with Hollywood Lies and Halloween Lies (both of which have now been updated).

Looking back at 2017

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It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We’ve been doing this since 2013.

2017 was pretty successful for us in terms of sales, as we were slightly up on 2016 sales, although 2011 still reigns supreme.

However, in terms of things that we planned to do… that’s a different story.

Best selling games

Our best selling games for the year were Way out West, followed by A Will to Murder and Casino Fatale. Way out West has consistently been our best seller for several years now, which suggest that our policy of giving it away (or at least, the 10 player version) is working.

Overall our top three games accounted for 29% of our sales.

New and updated games

For the second year in a row, we didn’t publish any new games in 2017. We had hoped to get The Food is to Die For ready, but Real Life interfered. Instead we should be able to publish it soon.

We did update Snow Business, however.

Freeformgames.com

The main change to our website is that we added Facebook comments to most of the pages. They’re not heavily used yet, but we’re starting to see questions and comments being asked via these, and they’re another channel for our customers to contact us (alongside our Facebook page).

We also signed up to Trustpilot, an independent review site. We did this because although we’re really proud of our testimonial page, independent testimonials are better. If you’d like to leave a review on Trustpilot, you can do so here.

What about our plans for 2017?

We set ourselves some goals for 2017. This is how we did:

Improve our website: So we had plans to update and improve our website, but that really didn’t happen. We’re still in the planning stage, and other things got in the way.

Update Curse of the Pharaoh: We didn’t do it in 2016 and we didn’t do it in 2017….

Update Snow Business: Hurrah, a success! We did this.

Publish The Food is to Die For: We thought we’d get this ready for 2017, but alas things slipped away from us.

Re-start work on The Reality is Murder: We did restart work on The Reality is Murder, but we haven’t finished it yet (as we had hoped last year).

So of our five goals we only one solid success. The others were either complete fails or partial successes.

Plans for 2018

We were a bit over ambitious in 2017, so we’re keeping 2018 simple.

Improve our website: We have two main plans for the website. The first is to retire the discussion forum, which means taking the best of it and putting that elsewhere. The other thing we’d like to do is restructure freeformgames.com so that it’s simpler and more intuitive. At the moment it can be a bit confusing to navigate.

Publish The Food is to Die For: It really isn’t too far off being ready for publication, so it should be available during 2018.

Publish The Reality is Murder: We’ve made a lot of progress on this, and we should be in a position to publish towards the back end of 2018.

Publish Murder on the Istanbul Express: Another new game that is nearly ready and has been through three rounds of playtesting.

So here’s to 2018 – and lots of new games!

“Best” Murder Mystery Parties

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Here’s a roundup of murder mystery party games by Hexagamers. They’ve taken a good long look at the various murder mystery companies that you can find on the internet and are trying them out to judge which really are the best.

Happily, we’re in the list – but they have yet to try one of our games. We’re looking forward to their feedback when they do.

Unbiased reviews

One of the things they talk about is the lack of unbiased reviews on the internet. Everyone puts testimonials from satisfied customers on their sites – and we do it here: Your murder mystery stories.

But they do point out the lack of negative reviews. After all, as a company we’re incentivised only to put up the good stories. That’s only human nature, obviously, but it’s not the only story. Most of the time we only receive positive reviews – and I think that’s because if the party has gone well, then people like to share their enjoyment. If it hasn’t gone well, they’re less likely to want to send us feedback.

But the point about unbiased reviews remains.

There are options for unbiased reviews such as Trustpilot, so that’s something we might explore.

Facebook likes

It’s also interesting to see how many Facebook likes the other companies have. We don’t push Facebook particularly hard and so we haven’t chased Facebook likes, but clearly we could do a bit better.

From our mailbox: twins

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Recently we were asked a question about having two people play the same character. (It might have been a mixup, and by the sounds of it the game was oversubscribed.)

Our answer was that while it was tricky, it was doable – particularly with the character she had chosen.

What we recommended was to make the characters twins.

To do this:

Give each player the full character pack, and explain that they are twins. (They can have the same name badge if you like – you could say that they look so alike that people can’t tell them apart.)
Tell the twins that they can work together or not, as they prefer.
Announce that the characters are twins that at the beginning of the game so that everyone understands what’s going on.
Don’t make any other changes – so don’t double up on (say) items that they might be looking for. Instead they will both be searching for that same item, and it either of them finds it, that counts as a joint success in the goal if they are working together (or a success for one and a failure for the other if not!)

In sides with distinct sides, creating a twin can unbalance things, but in this case it didn’t matter.

If you like the idea of trying this, here are a few things to consider:

It should be sensible for the character to be a twin – so we wouldn’t recommend twinning a parent, or anyone in a romantic relationship, or the Captain of a ship. That wouldn’t make sense.
We wouldn’t recommend twinning the murderer (!).
They shouldn’t have any unique items.

And of course, we don’t recommend doing this unless you absolutely have to – use all the characters (and free extra characters) first!

Note – we’ve not tested this – let us know if you try it out!

Playing A Will to Murder

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Cornelius and Janice conspiring on the balcony

We don’t often get to play our games, but last weekend I played in A Will to Murder.

Guy, one of my tabletop roleplaying friends, had bought A Will to Murder, and wanted to try one it with some of his friends. Although he didn’t ask me to run it (I thought he was going to), I said I was happy to play when I heard he was organising it.

Luckily, I couldn’t remember the plot of A Will to Murder. I last read it back in 2010, when I was proofreading it for Mo (who wrote it). Seven years is enough time for me to have completely forgotten about it, particularly given that I’ve not played it.

(So that explains why, if you ask a question about one of our older games, sometimes I’m a little slow in replying: I’m busy refreshing my memory. I’m pretty sure Mo has a much better memory.)

Even if I had remembered the plot, I would still have been happy to play and help make up the numbers. (If that had happened, I wouldn’t have played to win – that wouldn’t have worked as I would have known too many game secrets. Instead I would have played to help give everyone else a good time.)

Guy cast me as Alan Trode, the motorcycle dealer/mechanic who has married into the dysfunctional O’Leary family. The costume hint suggested biking leathers or denim jacket, so I wore a pair of jeans and a leather jacket – although it was so hot (we played in June, on the hottest day of the year so far) that I only wore the jacket for a few minutes.

Alan and Corey inside (with Janis and Cornelius on the balcony outside)

We played A Will to Murder with the minimum of six players. I think A Will to Murder works better with slightly more players, but a couple of players who had promised to attend had to drop out. A Will to Murder still works fine with six, but it would have been better with more.

None of the other players had played a Freeform Games murder mystery before (and Guy hadn’t run one either). Apart from a slightly slow start, though, they all seemed to take to it like old hands.

From what I could see, the slow start was partly because most of the players knew each other well (and had some catching up to do) and also because we only had six players. With few players, it’s possible that everyone in your Tips for Beginners is already talking to someone else. So that means you must:

Interrupt, which isn’t a natural action for a reserved Brit like myself.
Strike up a conversation with someone else with someone you don’t know. You should do this anyway, but at the start of a game conversations with someone your character doesn’t really know can be a bit awkward as nobody wants to give anything away too soon.
Wait (which is what happens after you’ve finished that awkward conversation in the bullet point above…).

I’m not going to talk about the plot of A Will to Murder because, well, spoilers, but I’m happy to report that for me, I had a relatively successful game (as measured by number of goals achieved, which isn’t a proper measure of success). I had four goals, and I succeeded in two of them. As one of them was effectively impossible (keeping a secret is always doomed to failure in one of our games!) I regard that as two out of three. That’s pretty good for me – I’m often hopeless at achieving my character’s goals.

And that’s not really how I measure success anyway. It’s all about whether I had a good time – and I certainly did. I enjoyed the game, I enjoyed watching everyone get into character, and I enjoyed the stories and the laughing at the end as everyone’s secrets were revealed.

So overall I had a lovely time playing A Will to Murder. I met new people, and hopefully I will get to run another game for them soon.

From our mailbag: absent characters

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I am preparing Hollywood Lies and I have 27 or 28 students coming to play. Many characters are supposed to interact with a certain person, but they are character number 29. Am I missing something?

Unfortunately, running the game with a few characters missing does result in gaps. This shouldn’t be a problem as everyone should have enough other contacts that the missing characters won’t impact on the game too much.

However, if you are concerned that your guests will want to talk to the missing character, then you can do what I do and tell your players (during the introduction) that if they want to contact any of the absent characters, they can simply talk to you.

To make this happen, you need to print out all the absent characters and bring them with you. You can either have them in envelopes, or in a folder. Then, when someone comes up to you and asks to speak with an “absent” character, you can quickly scan the character sheet and role-play that character.

(I also talk about this here.)

What you have to watch, however, is players who then try to “cheat” by using the absent characters to achieve their goals instead of interacting with the players present. I try not to let players do this – it’s better for everyone if they are talking and negotiating with the other players rather than with the host.

(For other ideas about using the absent characters, see here and here.)

How to Host a 1930s Murder Mystery Party (and get away with it)

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(Guest blog post by Jessica Andrews, author of Death on the Rocks.)

Ok, I’m just going to tell it like it is: hosting a 1930s party, murder mystery or otherwise, is not that easy. Twenties is obvious – just cover everything indiscriminately in feathers and strings of pearls – and for fifties you can just bust out some pineapples and stick c
ocktail umbrellas into everything.

But the 1930s were a little sleeker and a little subtler; that’s why it’s my favourite decade and why you should definitely give it a chance too.

#1 Candles

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you cannot host a vintage party without enough candles to potentially burn your house down. Of course, you don’t actually want to incinerate your home or anyone in it, so I would suggest a) keeping the candles away from arm level to protect them from the wild gesticulations of your guests and b) putting something non flammable underneath them.

A good tip to maximise the light from your candles is to place them where possible in front of mirrors.

#2 Greenery

I know, not necessarily something you would imagine a necessity for a 1930s soiree, but believe me it makes all the difference. Every Agatha Christie I’ve ever read seems to contain a – significant or otherwise – bowl of chrysanthemums (how does that even work?), but to be honest anything will do. Interestingly, I find potted ferns just scream vintage, and a good arrangement of classic roses also really adds the edge.

#3 Music

Even if this is the only tip you incorporate, I cannot stress its importance enough. The right music will immediately set the scene and make your guests feel more in character and more relaxed. For 1930s, think jazzy or sentimental and, if possible, crackly. You want your guests to feel like they’re in an old movie.

If you happen to have a record player and any 1930s records, this would, of course, be perfect; if not, YouTube is awash with vintage playlists or you can buy 1930s CDs online.

#4 Glassware & china

A party suddenly seems so much more vintage when the glassware and the china are old fashioned. If you happen to find some art deco style china in your local charity shop, amazing; if not, I really find anything a bit chintzy will do. And as for glassware, I have literally seen the shyest people in the world become positively RADA when clutching a champagne bowl or martini glass. I don’t know why, but it just works.

It will also make your event photos at least marginally less awkward on account of people having something to do with their hands.

#5 Backdrops & props

Let’s be realistic: it’s hard to vintage-ise your whole house without making some serious lifestyle changes and spending at least a month anxiously bidding on Ebay, so focus on just one wall or corner. Cheap art deco posters can be found online, and a wall of these will really add a vintage feel. And you definitely can’t go wrong with an old-fashioned telephone or cigarette holder for people to pose with.

I can guarantee you’ll end the night with some wall-gallery worthy photos of your party and a lot of happy guests!

Jessica Andrews

Jessica is the author of Death on the Rocks, our 1930s murder mystery set in an English village.

2016: Better than expected

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It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We did this last year, in 2014 and 2013.

2016 was an extraordinary year in many ways. Here at the Freeform Games HQ, we’re pretty happy with how 2016 went for us.

Sales overall were up 29% on 2015, and it was our second-best year ever – beaten only by 2011.

Best selling games

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

Overall our top three games accounted for 27% of our sales.

New and updated games

For the first time in many years (possibly ever!) we didn’t publish any new games in 2016. That wasn’t planned, but just the way it worked out. We have been working on a game (The Food is to Die For), it just wasn’t ready in 2016.

But that doesn’t mean we were just sitting around doing nothing, instead we:

Updated Death on the Gambia.
Streamlined Casino Fatale into one package (rather than the standard game and an expansion pack).
Turned the free version of Way out West into a book on Amazon. (2023 update – it didn’t sell so we’ve taken it down.)
Developed The Food is to Die For ready for release in 2017.

The interweb

We didn’t do much to our website in 2016. We had a few problems with spam on our discussion forum, which is why it’s currently turned off. At some point we will revisit that.

We’ve had more people contact us via Facebook this year, which is a trend that we expect to continue.

Google Adwords

We dipped our toe into the water with the advertising behemoth that is Google Adwords. We’re starting with a low monthly budget to see how it’s going. So far the results appear to be good – although the Adwords’ tracking tools suggest that we’re not making many direct sales as a result of the advertising, we think there’s more to it than that.

So there’s a bit of uncertainty with Adwords, but we’re keeping our budget small for the time being and we’re happy with the overall results.

Flash sales

We’ve been running regular Halloween and Christmas sales for a while, but this year we started to experiment with short ‘flash’ sales. We celebrated the discovering of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November with a short sale on Curse of the Pharaoh.

What about our plans for 2016?

We set ourselves some goals for 2016. This is how we did:

Improve the website, again. Fail – we didn’t pursue this in 2016.
Improve sales by exploring reviews or advertising. Success – we’re now advertising with Google Adwords. We haven’t explored reviews, but our sales have improved anyway.
Get the free Way out West in front of more people. Success – we’ve now turned Way out West into a book.
Update Death on the Gambia and Curse of the Pharaoh. Partial success – we updated Death on the Gambia but not Curse of the Pharaoh. We’re also almost finished with an update of Snow Business, but I’m not counting that as it wasn’t part of the plan.
Publish new games if possible. We didn’t promise to publish any games, and we didn’t.

So I think that’s mostly a success. Our main failure was to improve the website.

Targets for 2017

So here’s the targets we’re setting ourselves for 2017.

Improve our website: Google has a new tool we can play with to try out variants and see which is most effective.
Update Curse of the Pharaoh: We didn’t do it in 2016 so we’ll try and get it done for 2017.
Update Snow Business: This should be ready for early 2017.
Publish The Food is to Die For: Currently being playtested, so shouldn’t be too long before we publish it.
Re-start work on The Reality is Murder: This has been on the back boiler for years, and it’s time to dust it off and get it ready for publication. With a bit of luck we’ll get it published in 2017.

So here’s looking forward to a good 2017. We’ll catch up in early 2018 and review how we did.

Death on the Gambia and Snow Business updates

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Front cover for the Death on the Gambia cover booklet — Front cover for the ***Death on the Gambia*** cover booklet

You may not have noticed, but we’ve given Death on the Gambia a refresh.

Death on the Gambia was our first game, and it’s been in need of a refresh ever since we reformatted our games. So it now each character has a character booklet like all our newer games.

Unlike our recent Hollywood Lies revamp, we haven’t changed Death on the Gambia. It’s the same game, just in a new format. You can see what the front of the new character booklets look like above.

Snow Business

With Death on the Gambia updated, we’ve also started updating Snow Business. This is a work in progress, but you can see what the front of the character booklets look like below.

Snow Business is another of our early games, and it’s one that I’ve not looked at in a while. I had been a bit worried that it was a bit dated, but I’m very pleased at how well it compares our current games.

With a bit of luck the Snow Business update will be done by the end of the year.