Tag Archives: Way out West

Freeform Games in 2020

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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.

Learning to play our games online

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.

Best-selling games

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.

***Reunion with Death*** – our third most popular game of 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.

Three new games

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.

Last year’s goals

We set ourselves a few goals in 2020:

Improve our website: We made a few improvements this year:
- We improved the look and feel by as increasing the overall type size and line spacing
- We improved the right-hand menu on the games pages to make it easier to see new and best-selling games.
- We changed the style of our game cover graphics for our new games – we’ll update our earlier games as we go along.
- Our blog became more important as we posted lots of stories and advice about how to play our games online.
Publish The Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express. So a partial success as we published The Food is to Die For. Murder on the Istanbul Express will have to wait for 2021.
Finish updating Under the Big Top: This was originally planned for 2019, but we updated it in 2020.

Plans for next year

Improve our website: Our website is key to our business and so we’re always looking to improve it. I don’t think we’ll ever not have this as a goal.
Publish Murder on the Istanbul Express: With The Food is to Die for published, we’ll concentrate on Murder on the Istanbul Express. And after that, we’ve got Death at the Derby lined up.
Another new online game: Even if the pandemic disappears (and I think that’s for the long-term), it seems there’s a space for online murder mystery party games and so we’d like to publish another.

Summary

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.

Lockdown Way out West

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Following on from our last post about running a A Will To Murder in lockdown, we have another lockdown story – Way out West.

Paul Barnard used Zoom and ownCloud (a bit like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive) to run Way out West across five houses. Here’s how he did it.

Way out West across five houses

“With the Covid-19 isolation policies in place it was not possible for the family to get together for a face to face dinner. Instead we held the party using a zoom video conference across five different houses.

“I made images of all the items, Abilities, Secrets, Clues and Money. I created a “wallet” for each player using cloud storage (such as Dropbox) and provided each player with a link to their personal wallet that they could access from pretty much any device using a browser. I placed the item etc for each player in their wallet as a starting point.

Shared folders in ownCloud – one for each character, shared with that character’s player.

“With that all in place I sent around the character booklets, rules and general information ahead of the dinner. Game play went pretty much as expected with everyone on the conference, eating our various dinners and chatting in character. We had all dressed up in costumes, with one enterprising guest making a deputy hat from an Amazon delivery box.

“The big difference for this remote experience was that we used text messages for the private discussions and scheming. This really suited the younger attendees as they tend to do this all day anyway :-). A couple of the older attendees actually called each other on their phones and there was a bit of whispered background chat which had everyone on the conference straining to overhear.

“The participants were able to copy and paste their cards to the text messages when they needed to share them with others. For the secret stuff, like picking pockets, the thief did it via the bartender just like normal but again using texts. We used rock, paper, scissors on the conference just like we were face to face. It actually added to the intrigue when the bartender and one of the other guests started rock, paper scissors at seemingly random points through the evening.

“If things got stolen then the Bartender simply moved the item from the original players wallet to the new owners. This was achieved on a computer connected to the cloud storage folder. This worked surprisingly well as the original owner was even less aware they had been pickpocketed than if we had been playing face to face. A startled cry of “Where has my map gone?” 30 minutes after the pickpocketing again adding to the game.

“Our timings were handled exactly as in the game handout and the evening flowed perfectly despite the need to type texts to many people. At the end of the game the opinion of everyone was “when are we doing the next one?”

“During these times of forced separation and growing isolation your game provided a great excuse to gather the family together for an evening that everyone thoroughly enjoyed and greatly appreciated. We will be purchasing another of the games shortly.”

Paul then followed up with some great tips:

Lockdown party tips

“First create a wallet for each player. Use a cloud service like DropBox. I used ownCloud as I had an account for that already. A free account is big enough to hold the wallets. I created the wallets by making a folder for each player in the cloud storage.

We have a lot of girls in our family so I adjusted some of the players sex for our game. For each wallet create a share link. This is done on most services by right clicking the folder and selecting “Create Link” . This is the link that you will share with the guest playing that role.

I added the links to the invitations for each person. I created my own invitations as I needed to provide some help to people to get setup and understand how things worked. “ (See further below for Blaise’s invitation.)

“Second create virtual cards for the abilities, items, money, Clues and Secrets. I did this by creating JPG images copied from the pdf player booklets.

“Important: The filenames for all cards must be uniquely named to move them from folder to folder. I randomly numbered all the items and money so that where they came from was not obvious (see picture below, for an example).

Ability filenames were numbered from 1 to the maximum use. (SuddenInsight-1.jpg, SuddenInsight-2.jpg and so on.) I then deleted the ability cards as they were used. (You could just have one copy in the wallet and trust people to only use them the permitted number of times.)

A Wallet – ability names greyed out. Note that the filename of each of the money jpgs is unique.

“Above is the content of Blaise Sadler’s wallet at the start of the game. I’ve hidden the ability names to not ruin the experience for other players.”

This is what Blaise’s locker looks like on an iPhone.

“If you want to look at an object you just click it and you see it.”

“Third create a contacts group for the characters. As we used text and instant messaging for private conversations I collected everyone’s phone number and created a contacts group for everyone. Save the list as a contacts card and then attendees can click the .vcf file to add all the characters to their device. Sending a text now just needs you to enter the character’s name.”

Way out West virtual party invitation

Here’s Paul’s invitation to his virtual Way out West. He created a pdf for each player, with unique links to their Wallet (I’ve blurred the urls). I really like the way he clearly explains how the game will be played and what technology will be used.

Freeform Games in 2019

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We’re mid-way through January so it’s time to look back and see how the last twelve months have been. I don’t like to do this in December, because the year isn’t fully over and we haven’t tallied all the sales.

Death on the Gambia - Murder Mystery Game — ***Death on the Gambia***

We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – you can read them all here.

2019 continued to build on the success of 2018, at least in terms of sales. We sold 13% more games compared to 2018 – and we’ve doubled our sales since 2014. However, we’re taking that as 2013 and 2014 were low points: we’re only 38% up on 2011.

(The difference is down to Google. If I remember correctly, there was an algorithm change in 2013 that hurt us badly compared to the previous years. A reminder of how vulnerable we are to factors outside of our control.)

Best selling games

Our best selling games for the year were Way out West, followed by A Will to Murder and A Speakeasy Murder. So the same as last year.

Overall our top three games accounted for 27% of our sales (again similar to last year).

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

Returning customers accounted for about 20% of our sales. I’m not sure how to interpret that. If I had to speculate, I can think of several reasons:

Our games are only occasional purchases – few people host lots of murder mystery parties.
Returning customers may use a different email address to purchase their next game.
80% of our customers don’t like our games enough to purchase another. (I hope this isn’t the case!)

Given that most of our feedback is extremely positive* (we get a lot of great feedback as you can see on our stories page) and only a few requests for refunds (usually because our games are more complicated than expected), I suspect that the low number of return customers is simply due to the relative infrequency of our games.

*And we’re much more likely to hear about positive experiences over average ones.

We’ve sold more German-language games this year than ever before – and that’s thanks to our wonderful affiliate Simone and her website Krimispiele-Seite.

Bundle of Holding repeated their 2017 murder mystery game offer, with eight of our games bundled together.

We also appeared in a video!

New and updated games

At the start of November Mo suggested that we create a Christmas-themed version of Hollywood Lies. The new game is called Christmas Lies and it took me the rest of the month to create so that it was ready for December (but not really soon enough to make much of an impact on our Christmas sales – at least not this year).

Death on the Rocks - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — ***Death on the Rocks***

What about our plans for 2019?

We set ourselves a few goals for 2019. How did we do?

Improve our website: This year we did a few minor tweaks and added lots of customer photos and stories, but didn’t get to the larger changes that I’d hoped we would make.
Publish The Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express. For the second year running this didn’t happen. Fingers crossed for 2020.
Update Under the Big Top or Happy Birthday RJ. I flipped a coin and started to update Under the Big Top. Unfortunately I didn’t get it finished, so that’s one to complete in 2020.
Improve our use of Facebook: While I’m not sure we’ve completely mastered Facebook (and I find the interface for businesses utterly atrocious), we have posted regularly and kept up engagement. It certainly seems that many of our customers now contact us for support through our Facebook page. If you want to keep up with the latest Freeform Games news, our Facebook page is the first place we post it (followed by the blog, and then we issue a newsletter when we have a bit more content).

So not so good – the only real achievement was improving our use of Facebook.

But what have we done instead? Well, it’s been a mix of things. Most of our time has been spent on customer support – with the increased sales brings more queries that need answering. Plus we’ve had a few queries from potential partners that have taken up time. And added to that we’ve not had a great year health-wise, and haven’t had as much capacity as usual.

The Reality is Murder - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — ***The Reality is Murder***

Goals for 2020

So these are our goals for 2020 – broadly more of the same.

Improve our website: This is an eternal promise – our website is key to our business and so we’re always looking to improve it.

Publish The Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express: Hopefully. At least one of them….

Finish updating Under the Big Top: This has stalled slightly, and I need to pick it back up and get it done.

TL;DR

Overall, 2019 was a great success for Freeform Games, and we’re hoping for a good 2020.

A Heroic Death - a Freeform Games murder mystery game — ***A Heroic Death***

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?

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**

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!

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.

Looking back at 2015

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It’s the start of a new year and that means it’s time for us to look back and reflect on how we did last year. We did this last year, and for 2013 before that.

Sales overall were up 7% on 2014, and it was our best since 2012. Sales might have been even higher, but for some website problems – more on that below.

Hopefully this trend will continue into 2016, and we will continue to improve our website to make sure that it can be found by the search engines.

Best selling games

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

Way-out-West33 — Way out West – our best-selling game of 2015

I predicted last year that A Speakeasy Murder would outsell Hollywood Lies, and sure enough that’s exactly what happened. It’s pleasing to see a new game in the top three. And Way out West’s popularity is boosted by it being our free game.

Overall the top three games accounted for 28% of our sales.

New and updated games

In 2015 we published Death on the Rocks and we updated Hollywood Lies.

Website improvements

We also made changes to our website in 2015. The main change was to make the menu more responsive on smaller screens – tablets and phones. This had been on the to-do list for a while, but Google announced last year that it would be prioritising sites that worked well on smaller screens, so we moved it up the to-do list.

Looking at our traffic, it seems that while we get a healthy volume of traffic from smaller screens, purchases tend to be made from laptops or desktop PCs. We believe that our visitors are browsing our site with a mobile device before purchasing a game with their “main” computer.

Website problems

We had two big problems last year. We had a few outages in the first part of the year which led us to change our hosting provider (which is always a challenge). And then in October (the run up to our busiest time of year) our new hosts updated their database software, and that meant we had to update our site.

Our plans for 2015

We set ourselves some goals for 2015. This is how we did:

Continuing to improve the website, and keep an eye on its performance: Website improved, performance good but would have been better without the problems described above.
Publish Death on the Rocks. Achievement unlocked!
Update Hollywood Lies: We finally published the updated Hollywood Lies in December. The update took us longer than we though and you can read about that here.
Publish our standard rules. Stretch goal reached! We snuck our standard rules into our games last year, and talked about it here.

DotR Group — Death on the Rocks – our new game for 2015

Our plans for 2016

Improve the website, again. Maintaining a website is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time you finish, you need to start over. So we still have a few things that need sorting, and we want make it as attractive to visitors as possible.
Improve sales by exploring reviews or advertising.
Get the free Way out West in front of more people. We think seeing our games is a good selling point, and we’ve got some ideas for that.
Update Death on the Gambia and Curse of the Pharaoh. They’re both popular games, but they need an update to the new format.
Publish new games if possible. We have some games in the pipeline, but none of them are that close to publication right now. So we’re not making any promises for 2016 (we want to concentrate elsewhere). If it happens, it happens.

Looking back at 2014

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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.

Sales overall – a bit flat

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!

Best selling games

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.

Way out West goes Steampunk — ***Way out West*** – our best-selling game of 2014

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.

New and updated games

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:

Made a few cosmetic changes (including more photos) and rearranged the layout to make it more friendly.
Changed the site header to the montage photograph when testing proved that it was more effective than a testimonial.
Added a page for customers new to our games.
Updated the FAQ and pulled it all into one place (it was tucked around in different places before).
combined the stories and pictures pages into a single page, which makes them easier to see (and avoids duplicating content which can be a search-engine black mark).
Kept the blog going fairly consistently for most of the year, but towards the end of the year Real Life got away from me and I was unable to update is as much as I liked. I’m hoping to be a bit more regular again in 2015.

Overall the website changes seem to have worked, so I think that’s a success.

Looking back at our plans for 2014

We set ourselves some goals this time last year. Here’s how we did:

Get the website into a healthier place: Overall traffic was flat, but that hides a dip in the early part of 2014 and an encouraging upward trend since the start of September. So hopefully that will continue.
Publish Murder on the Dancefloor and A Speakeasy Slaughter: success. We thought we might get Death on the Rocks published as well, but that has slipped.
Update All at Sea: success, and now published as Murder at Sea.
Mo and I talked about possibly getting together one weekend to write a game (a bit like Peaky), but that didn’t happen and it was always optional.

Looking forward to 2015

Our plans for 2015 include:

Continuing to improve the website, and keep an eye on its performance.
Publish Death on the Rocks.
Update Hollywood Lies, bringing it into line with our current format.
Publish our standard rules. Our outstanding action from the feedback we received last May was to prepare standard rules that can be shared and sent out in advance. We’re well on the way with this.

Here’s looking forward to a good 2015 for Freeform Games!

Arrests in Way out West

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In Way out West the Sheriff and Deputy can (via an ability) arrest other characters. There are various ways in which someone can escape arrest, one of which is that the restrained player gets outside help.

We’ve recently been asked if the player providing the outside help needs an ability to cut the ropes/unlock the door and help the restrained character to escape.

If we’re presented with this situation during a game, we ask how the helping player plans to release the arrested character. If they have an item which will obviously help, that’s great: but if they have a good enough imagination, then they don’t need to have a specific item. After all, Way out West is set in the Wild West town of Cactus Gulch and there are lots of other things lying around which aren’t represented on the item cards.

So if they need something particular for their imaginative plan, and it’s reasonable that they might find it in Cactus Gulch, we let them succeed.

Basically our guideline is: if it feels ‘fair’ that they should succeed, because they’ve put in some effort to find items or to invent a good plan, then they should succeed.