Despite the best laid plans, sometimes real life intervenes and a guest or two may turn up late to your murder mystery party. Here are some ideas for how you can deal with latecomers. Unplanned latecomers The worst situation is when you don’t find out that someone will be late until they don’t turn up on time. In this situation I would delay the...
Back on 20th July we ran a playtest of our new game Death on the Rocks, in London. Playtesting is an important part of our development process. However well a murder mystery game’s been written and edited, it can’t be considered finished until it’s been thoroughly tested. We call it ‘playtesting’ because it takes the form of playing through the...
Note - this is a thought experiment for experienced hosts and players. I've yet to try this out - so I don't know if it works. There’s a style of freeform/larp known as a “horde” game. These normally involve six to eight “core” characters and typically dozens of smaller roles. The players playing the fixed characters stay with those characters...
First class passengers enjoying Murder at Sea 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...
Back in April Mo and I attended the Peaky 2014 freeform writing weekend. (I wrote about that last year.) This year Mo and I both pushed boundaries – his group took his idea from last year (“What Happened in Blackpool/Picking up the pieces”) and expanded upon it to create a version (currently unnamed) that works for up to 40 players! (They tested...
We love getting feedback. Our favourites are the unsolicited emails we get telling us about your parties, but sometimes we send out our feedback form. In March we did just that and sent out 1200 feedback requests to our most recent purchasers of our games. Actually, when I say we’ve got them back, we only received 11 responses. We think a lot of...
To coincide with the launch of Murder on the Dancefloor, we asked the game’s author, Terence Smith, for a few words describing where the game came from: “My involvement with Freeform Games began with my 15th birthday in 2010. I was a drama student at school and, along with my friends, played Lei’d to Rest. This was followed by many more over the...
I talked a couple of posts back about helping to run Cafe Casablanca, but what I didn't talk about is how I used our "three golden rules" to guide my decisions during the game. As our hosts know, we have three golden rules when it comes to hosting a murder mystery game: Is it fun? Will it spoil the game for anyone else? Make it up! The fourth...
We provide safe, simple rules in our murder mystery games, but sometimes it’s fun to make those rules more closely align to the real world. Here are some examples. These first two are from Denise Knebel in the USA. The secret cupboard One of our games (I’m not going to say which) has a secret cupboard which is normally managed by the host. Here’s...
Last year I talked about how Mo and I attended The King’s Musketeers, a weekend long freeform. This year’s weekend game was Cafe Casablanca, and while Mo played Philip Marlowe, I was one of the six “directors” (ie, a host). Mo, looking very dapper as Philip Marlowe Cafe Casablanca is based on Hollywood thrillers and wartime dramas of the ‘30s and...