Murder at Sea photos from Carol Strevens.
She held the party in a manor house, which suited the formal dress.
Click here to learn more about Murder at Sea.
Murder at Sea is also available in French as La Croisiere Fatale.
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?
One of our customers, Peal, got in touch with us recently to share with us a site they had prepared for lockdown Murder at Sea with 20 guests.
We’re really impressed – it’s a great way to set the scene for your online murder mystery party.
They built their site using Google sites. I’m not sure if they used one of the templates or if they built it from scratch (possibly the Event template). Other free website builders are available.
Murder at Sea – Home page
This is the home page. They’ve used an image of a suitable liner and included our introductory text from the game. They also included a couple of checklists.
Before the Party Checklist
On the Day
Then head on over to The Great Staircase and join the Zoom Meeting
(Murder at Sea starts with the lights going out and Captain Bayard being shot – I don’t know how they staged that.)
The map
This page contains the locations where the game will be played. The Great Staircase is the main Zoom location – that’s where the party will start. (Note that Zoom has a 40 minute time limit if you don’t have the paid version. Jitsi is a free alternative, but lacks some of the features that Zoom has.)
The other 11 locations (The Dining Room, a First Class Cabin, an Empty Deck and so on) are all Google Hangouts that the players can use to have private conversations.
(I’ve explained how you can set up Google Hangouts in this way at the bottom of the page.)
Character Details
On this page, everyone can get access to the information about their character.
Cast List
This is our cast list – it’s our cast list pdf embedded in the page.
So for example, clicking on Christina Younger takes you to the page below:
The three links on this page (Items, Abilities, Character Description) all go to protected Google Drive folders that the host has set up. Access has been shared with the relevant player only, so only they have access.
You could also use Dropbox or OneDrive – or ownDrive as one of our other customers recently described here.
Zoom Backgrounds
Zoom lets you add a virtual background to your calls, so rather than seeing your normal background you appear to be somewhere more appropriate.
So here the host found (and created) lots of thematic image files (.pngs) for their players to use.
Here are some examples of images – one of an Edwardian room and the other a background for one of the characters – this one for Elizabeth James with the Union Jack.
There were even animated angel wings, presumably for characters who had died during the game.
Rules
The final page, Rules, has links to our standard rules for poison, pickpocketing and so on.
Google Hangouts
Here’s how you can set up a video call that people can just drop into and out of.
1 – go to https://hangouts.google.com/
2 – In the middle of the screen you should see:
3 Click on “Video Call”
4 You will get a new pop-up with the video call. You’ll also get a dialogue box like this – just close it by clicking the X in the top right corner.
5 You’re now in a video call, all alone.
6 Copy the URL of the call, which will look like “https://hangouts.google.com/call/…” and then a random list of letters and numbers.
7 Save that URL somewhere. Anyone can then click on that URL and go straight into your video call. (And I mean anyone, so be careful about making it too public!)
8 Set up several hangouts – and give them appropriate names such as “On deck” or “At the bar” or “Under the gazebo”.
So it’s that time of year again when we look back at the past twelve months and review how we did. We did this for 2013, and now it’s time for 2014.
2014 was overall a bit flat for us – a rise of just over 1%. However, that figure hides quite a bit of good news, as although the first few months were generally very bad, since the beginning of September our sales picked up and showed typically 10-20% year-on-year growth.
Hopefully that trend will continue into 2015.
We believe that the improvement is down to two things: first, we’ve improved our website and made it more user-friendly (and thus search-engine friendly). Second, Google changed it’s algorithms again. A couple of years ago Google changed their algorithm and penalized low-quality websites. Unfortunately it seems that they were a bit over-zealous and we might have been caught by that change. Last year they re-tweaked their algorithms and we appear to be one of the beneficiaries. Hopefully future tweaks will only be to our benefit!
Once again, our best selling games were Way out West (by some way), then Casino Fatale, and followed by Hollywood Lies. The overall levels of sales were broadly the same as for 2013, with Casino Fatale dropping a bit. Overall, the top three games accounted for 28% of our sales.
We believe that Way out West’s popularity is boosted as it’s our free game – so presumably customers are upgrading to the paid version when they want to add more players. One thing we could do to test that is to change the free game, and that’s something we may think about in the future.
We published two new games in 2014: Murder on the Dancefloor and A Speakeasy Murder. We also updated one of our older games, Murder at Sea (originally All at Sea), bringing it into line with our current format.
Sales of A Speakeasy Murder have started strongly, and in 2015 it may be challenging Hollywood Lies for a top three position.
Doubling our newsletter’s readership
In 2014 we doubled the readership of our newsletter, which was its best growth for a long time.
Improving the website
Last year we identified that we needed to improve our website and as a result we:
Overall the website changes seem to have worked, so I think that’s a success.
We set ourselves some goals this time last year. Here’s how we did:
Our plans for 2015 include:
Here’s looking forward to a good 2015 for Freeform Games!
All at Sea was our second murder mystery game and is written by Chris Boote. Apart from amending a couple of errors we haven’t really touched it at all since its release in 2002.
However, since then we’ve changed our game layout (more than once!) and as All at Sea is one of our more popular games, we thought it was worth bringing it up to date.
The most obvious change is it’s title. All at Sea is now Murder at Sea. We changed it’s name for two reasons. The first is that Murder at Sea is a better description of what the game is about, and the second is that putting “murder” in the title of the game helps the search engines realise that our site is about murder mystery games. (If you cast your eye over our current range, that might not jump out at you, and we may may one or two similar changes in the future.)
Here are some of the other changes we’ve made:
If you’ve already bought All at Sea you can download the Murder at Sea right now using the same link and password that we’ve already sent.
Note – the update is for the English version only (at this time).
Here’s what we’re working on right now.
The Speakeasy Slaughter, our upcoming 1920’s Prohibition game for 15 to 32 guests, is making progress. Our playtest in London didn’t happen in September as originally planned, but we’re still hoping to get another playtest in later this year. We’ve provided a wealth of comments that author Becky Channon (who previously wrote A Heroic Death) is working on. Expect to see The Speakeasy Slaughter some time in 2014.
Following hard on the heels of The Speakeasy Slaughter is Death on the Rocks, by Jessica Andrews, and is just entering its first playtest.
Steve is revising All at Sea (new title, Murder at Sea), one of our older games. We’re making cosmetic changes to bring it up to our current standards (so character booklets for everyone) and tweaking a few of the characters to make them more fun to play.
And after this? We’ve got plenty more to keep us busy!