The Freeform Games newsletter December 2019: Christmas Lies, ideas for prizes, converting Curse of the Pharaoh, and a review of The Reality is Murder.
Freeform Games newsletter December 2019: Christmas Lies
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Freeform Games murder mystery blog
Freeform Games newsletter August 2019: Extra characters for Court in the Act
Welcome to the Freeform Games murder mystery party newsletter! Welcome to another issue of our occasional newsletter. In this issue we talk about: Extra characters for Court in the Act A Speakeasy Murder actual play video Pirate games for Talk Like a Pirate Day Keeping score in a murder mystery game Enjoy! Mo and SteveNew characters for Court in...
Keeping Score
“Every now and again we are asked if we have a way of assigning points to goals so that our guests can keep score. While we don’t do this normally, this is our suggestion…”
A Speakeasy Murder – video
Helena Mas sent us this spoiler-free video of A Speakeasy Murder, filmed at Cafe Repin in Potsdam, Germany.
Adding characters to Court in the Act
We were recently asked by Pam, one of our customers: I'm getting ready to run Court in the Act in three weeks time. I was just sending out character assignments tonight, and realized I accidentally listed Sir Walter Raleigh twice in my list, so I have two different people down to play him! My cast list/assignments is full, and I already have...
Hollywood Lies – actual play!
So what does a Freeform Games murder mystery party really look like? They're hard to describe, and if you've not seen or played in one, they're fairly hard to imagine. So here's a moment from Hollywood Lies, sent to us by Julie D'Augusta. In this scene, Jules Milton is being thrown out from the Post-Modern Freeform Movement (one of many plots in...
Investigating Pickpocket Crimes
Pickpocketing can be a divisive mechanic amongst experienced freeformers (although I’ve never heard any of our customers complain about it). On one hand it’s a useful mechanic for replicating a real-life skill (one that is thankfully rare); on the other hand it can be particularly demoralising to have spent all game trying to get hold of...
Big Money
I experimented recently with printing our money at approximately life-size, and it looks really good - and feels much more like money. This experiment was inspired by the photograph above from Way out West. Sent to us by Jaqui French, I was intrigued by the dollar bills. Those look like the graphics from our money cards, but printed extra...
Looking back at 2018
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 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 -...
Never too old to learn new tricks
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...