Melissa Midcap sent us some photos of her The Food is to Die For party.
She writes: “For The Food is to Die For, we held it in the back room of a restaurant whose owner we know. It really added something to the setting to be in an actual restaurant! For deciding duels (of which there was surprisingly only one!), we had players draw bottle corks that were numbered on the bottom. Higher number won.”
The Food is to Die For is available in French as Panique au Restaurant.
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?
Gather.town is a map-based virtual space where users can walk around a map and engage in video conversation based on their proximity to one another.
Although we’ve not tried it, it’s another option if you want to run a murder mystery game online.
Gather.town uses a map, and while several are provided none of them are ideally suited for our games.
However, one of our fabulous customers create a gather.town map for The Food is to Die For and has shared it with us.
Unsurprisingly, 2020 was all about the pandemic for Freeform Games.
2020 had started well, with sales in January and February building on 2019 (which was a good year for us). And then in March the pandemic properly reached the UK and USA and our sales dropped off a cliff…
We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – you can read them all here.
With lockdown, our amazing customers started playing our games online—using Zoom or Discord or Google Hangouts or whatever system they found easiest.
That inspired us to both create games specifically for online play, and also to learn how to play our “normal” games online.
So for most of 2020 that’s what we’ve been doing – learning to play our games online. And also sales dropped off a cliff in March, things picked back up. Not to 2019 levels, but our sales for 2020 were similar to those in 2017.
2020 brought a change to our best-selling games, with new online game Reunion with Death coming third (close behind perennial favourite Way out West). A Will to Murder topped our best-sellers list in 2020.
Overall our top three games accounted for a hefty 35% of our sales. It’s noticeable that in 2020 our smaller games have been more popular, which is I think a reflection of the smaller games being easier for online play.
We published three new games in 2020.
Reunion with Death by Mo Holkar. Written specifically for the lockdown, and set in a hotel where everyone is locked in their rooms. We also produced a festive version, Christmas Reunion with Death (but I’m not counting that as a separate game).
Death in Venice also by Mo. Another lockdown murder mystery, this time everyone is locked in their cabins aboard a luxury yacht.
The Food is to Die For by Anastasia Kulpa, set in a restaurant. This has been close to publication for a couple of years now, and in 2020 we finally rolled up our sleeves and published it.
We also updated Under the Big Top, to bring it into line with our newer format.
We set ourselves a few goals in 2020:
So although 2020 was bad, we weathered the pandemic and have learned more about playing our games online.
As the vaccine is rolled out and normality returns, hopefully we will return to playing our games in person.