Lorraine Shaw sent us some photographs of her A Heroic Death murder mystery party.
She writes: “We had an awesome evening playing A Heroic Death! It was my daughter’s 17th birthday party. This is the 3rd freeform game we’ve played and we love them (we are in Zimbabwe). Such fun for everyone!”
It looks like they are having lots of fun!
A Heroic Death is also available in German as Ein heldenhafter Tod.
Debbie Townsend sent us her A Heroic Death photos which she hosted for a Christmas family gathering in a Welsh manor.
She used both the adults and the children’s version of A Heroic Death and writes, “It was a fantastic evening’s entertainment, some really competitive players. Children loved being involved too. No-one guessed who the murderer was. Thank you so much!”
Click here to learn more about A Heroic Death.
A Heroic Death is also available in German as Ein heldenhafter Tod.
Following on from our birthday post last month, I thought it would be interesting to show when we published each game. I’ve excluded translations to keep things simple…
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
One of the things that amazes me is how my memory has changed everything. I think of A Speakeasy Murder as one of our newer games, but it’s now over seven years old! And was it really in 2009 when we published The Karma Club?
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).
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).
“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.
“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…
“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)!”
Second in our occasional author profiles, this time it’s the turn of Becky Channon – author of A Heroic Death and A Speakeasy Murder.
Becky grew up in London, England, and (mis)spent her youth writing comic short stories with her brother. Much later, her brother asked her to write him a funny superhero-themed murder mystery party for his upcoming birthday. Becky wrote this in a couple of weeks, and the party was very successful.
Having previously hosted both Curse of the Pharaoh and Death on the Gambia, Becky was already a fan of Freeform Games and saw on our website that we were looking for new writers. So after the party she decided to submit her game.
We were interested in her superhero game, but Becky was surprised to find that the process of transforming her game to fit the Freeform Games template (along with adding extra characters, playtesting, and editing) took considerably longer than writing the original game. However, nearly two years later A Heroic Death was released.
As a fan of the 1920s, Becky had been disappointed that Freeform Games didn’t include a 1920s speakeasy-style game in our catalogue. And as there still wasn’t one after A Heroic Death was published, she decided that she’d have to write it herself.
This new game was almost three times the size of her first, but Becky knew the process now and A Speakeasy Murder was produced and developed faster than her first game, despite it being much harder to find enough volunteers to playtest it.
Becky had enormous fun cramming the game full of as many cultural references as she possibly could. Can you spot them all?