Tag Archives: The Reality is Murder

Our games by year…

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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

  • Christmas Lies (the festive version of Hollywood Lies) by Steve Hatherley

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?

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).