A Grimsby murder mystery game producer has teamed up with global brand Stella Artois for social distancing lockdown fun.
Red Herring Games was awarded the contract with the ‘reassuringly expensive’ beer to produce a new game.
Owner Jo Smedley said the platform has seen a “rapid resurgence” in recent months, once families and friends had exhausted weekly quizzes.
They have provided a new turn-to when gathering online, with a tech addition via Alexa, aided by the brewing giant.
Stella Artois sought out the firm for a brand-inspired product to build excitement.
Mrs Sedley, a previous Small Business Sunday and Small Award winner, said planning began during the latter half of the first lockdown, with all those involved in the process meeting via Zoom from various bedrooms and home offices.
“I was thrilled to be asked,” she said. “It was amazing to have the opportunity to provide creative input into such an iconic global brand
“Feeding into the process at an early stage meant we could create a game that would be appropriate for a wider audience.”
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Mystery in the Life Artois features a number of developments that Red Herring Games has been implementing in their own catalogue over the last year.
“The world has changed drastically in the last few years,” Jo said. “More and more of our customers are looking for uneven gender balances, gender neutral characters, and games that can be played by all. Lockdown also brought new challenges with much smaller groups playing murder mystery games and as well as more and more people who’d never played games like this before.
“We fed all this into the creative process with Stella Artois very early on, and together with their design team we developed a game for four to six players where two characters are gender neutral, two more are fully optional and everything is scripted in such a way as to make the game incredibly easy to play even if you’ve never played something like it before.”
As well as a unique play format, the team was also involved in the design process created an inspector part that can be played using the latest in smart speaker technology.
“You just have to ask Alexa to play the inspector,” Jo said. “It’s a leap ahead of anything we could do ourselves.”
Throughout the month Stella Artois is providing a digital download of the game to anyone buying a box set from Amazon.
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“This will make our game even easier to play with remote friends and family,” Tom Kent, brand manager for Stella Artois said.
“Once you have the box, you will be able to email your friends and family a digital copy of the booklet so you don’t have to rely on the postal service to deliver the booklets to their door.”