After months of hard work, we’re excited to announce that our new adventure, Murder On The Moon, will be launching on Kickstarter tomorrow.
Make sure to follow the campaign for some ‘out of this world’ early bird bargains!
Visit our Kickstarter here and click “Notify” to be alerted when it goes live.
We were so excited to win the UK Games Expo award for “Best Digital Hybrid” for our game “Trouble In Folklore Falls”.
“Best Digital Hybrid” is a new category this year in the prestigious awards, showing the soaring popularity of the genre. Since, 2020, we’ve been making games that combine physical board-game-esque ‘stuff’ with digital online experiences, and its so great that the board game community has recognised the category. We was absolutely thrilled to not only be shortlisted, but to win the People’s Choice Award!
Thank you so much to everyone who voted for us!
And a big thank you to Callum and Tom who co-designed the adventure. You can check the game out on our shop, click here.
We have returned from our grand adventure to slay some dragons and wow… what a week it has been!
In case you don’t know, we appeared on BBC’s Dragon’s Den on Thursday 10th March. In the segment shown, you can see us doing battle with the mighty entrepreneurs, pitching for investment in our growing business.
“Being on the Den was a life-goal achieved for me,” said co-founder, Dan Wiseman. “I’ve watched the show since it began in 2005. I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship.”
What viewers may not know is that the team were actually pitching to the Dragons for around an hour and a half – which is obviously edited down into the 14 minute segment you see on TV. During this time, we covered everything from the intricacies of the games we make to our ambitious long-term plans for the business.
If you’ve been following our content over the last two years, you will know that we’re passionate gamers and have tons of ideas for new adventures. Joe Mills, co-founder and head of puzzle design, has a lot of experience in both the design of escape rooms and the production of complex immersive experiences, and finds great joy in developing new theatrical mysteries for people to play:
“The passion of the dragons about how inventive and exciting our games and business can be has really spurred me on to up my creativity and ensure we make the best games we can possibly make,” says Joe. “Being on Dragons’ Den has really helped to shine a light on the mystery puzzle game genre. They’re not just for board gamers – they’re for everyone.”
Indeed, one of the biggest sections of our audience is non-traditional gamers – with people playing our games on date nights, team building days and evenings in with friends.
After the excitement of Dragons’ Den on Thursday and then a long 450-mile round trip to exhibit at AireCon in Harrogate over the weekend, needless to say we’re due a holiday, but owning a business never stops and we’re already hard at work on our next project.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far on our journey! Every time you share and comment on our social media posts, every time you buy our games, tell a friend or leave a review – it gives us a huge boost that helps to make our small business possible.
We hope you will continue to enjoy our games and that we can continue to work hard to bring you exciting new mysteries for many years to come!
Stay safe Detectives!
Dan, Joe & Tristan
Tonight’s episode (3rd March) revealed some familiar faces will be coming up in next week’s Dragons’ Den…
The secret is out! We’re excited to announce that Dan and Joe will be facing up to the Dragons in an attempt to get investment for The Detective Society.
“It was a life-goal achieved, pitching to the dragons; so valuable to get their insight on our growing business. And it was great to see how keen they were to try and solve our puzzle!”
Tune in to BBC1 on iPlayer on Thursday March 10th at 8pm to see how we got on!
This is a copy of an update posted to our Kickstarter on February 21st 2022.
Hey Detectives!
We’re delighted to have reached our funding goal. This means that our print-run of The Disappearance of Claire Makova in German will go ahead.
In case you haven’t yet bought in to the project, this will be the only place to get your copy so don’t miss out! We know that many people got in touch with us after our first Kickstarter hoping to get their hands on copies, but we can only do limited print-runs based on what people pre-order here on Kickstarter. So get your orders in!
And if you are looking for some feedback from players enjoying our English version, here is some of the best:
“I’ve done a few subscription boxes, and this was by far the best… There’s as much content in this one episode as I’ve seen in complete experiences.”
“I’m pretty sure this is the only Kickstarter I’ve backed that has shipped on time. Great job!”
“An engaging narrative, fun puzzles, and a bombshell of an ending… one of the top options available.”
And as always, you can support our small business by sharing this game with your friends, families and pets (lol).
Stay safe Detectives!
From Dan, Joe & Tristan
Dear Detectives,
It has now been nearly two years since we launched The Disappearance of Claire Makova, and we’re still delighted that people are playing and enjoying our games!
When we launched our first kickstarter we included a stretch goal to translate our games into several other languages – we hit that stretch goal thanks to all of you, and set off on our translation journey!
We are now delighted to announce that we’re commissioning another print run of the German version of The Disappearance of Claire Makova! Which we have exclusively launched on Kickstarter:
This is your opportunity to grab our award-winning first season in German. We’ve also added a special option to purchase episodes 2 – 6 if you only purchased episode 1 in German before and would like to complete the season!
We’d love you to back us so that we can continue to deliver our game worldwide.
All the best,
Joe, Tristan and Dan
Last October, I was interviewed by Allen Higgins, lecturer at University College Dublin. Allen’s podcast is a teaching resource for students taking the second year “game design” class in the Business School at the University.
If you are interested in learning a bit more about behind the scenes of running a games company, take a listen.
There is also an open educational resource at https://gamefulthinking.blogspot.com
Visit the podcast twitter socials here: https://twitter.com/designtalk_ie
Thanks for reading
Written by Dan Wiseman
Co-Founder, The Detective Society
We were absolutely delighted to win two awards in the 2021 ESCAPETHEROOMers awards.
Following winning “Best Mystery” last year, we have now won:
1. Best Mystery – 2021, The Sudden Silence of Timothy Lee
2. Bullseye Player’s Choice Award (Silver) – 2021, The Cursed Exhibition
3. Finalist for Best Print-and-Play, 2021, The Professor’s Missing Potion
Thank you so much to everyone who supported us, voted for us, shared our content and enjoyed our games! We make games because we love playing games. It means a great deal to us when people play our games and when we are compared alongside other creators products.
Thank you all! Here is to 2022
We’re delighted to have reached the finals of the 2021 Bullseye Award’s for Best Tabletop Game (“The Cursed Exhibition“) and Best Online Game (“The Professor’s Missing Potion“).
But now we need your votes! Only a few days remaining…
Everyone who votes, is automatically entered into the raffle for a chance to win some great prizes!
You can vote once per day, per category, so please please please take a few minutes to vote for our games if you can!
Last years awards was a big boost for us, and that allowed us to begin development of extra games and projects to share with you.
If we win this year, we’re going to offer a special gift for our community. Thank you so much for your support!
Choose “The Cursed Exhibition” in the “Tabletop Games” selection.
And/or “The Professor’s Missing Potion” in the “Online Games” selection.
Voting closes midnight EST (NY time) on Dec. 22nd.
It’s been a tough few years for global shipping. With the effects of the global pandemic and – in the UK – Brexit, the cost to send parcels internationally has skyrocketed…
We’ve spent the last 10 months tweaking, experimenting and testing new services, in an attempt to make our global shipping more cost-effective. So it is with great delight that we announce, with immediate effect, our new shipping prices:
We’ve been “customs friendly” to the USA for a while now, but we’re delighted to say that all our shipping to Europe is now “customs friendly” too! We send our games via a ‘Delivery Duties Paid’ (DDP) method.