by: Michael Barnes

My first experience with Letters from Whitechapel, a new deduction game published by Italian imprint Nexus, followed a very specific arc. I was already excited by the prospect of playing a serious attempt at a Jack the Ripper-themed deduction game. When I saw the box and the outstanding production design virtually seeping with a delightfully bloody and dark gothic horror atmosphere coupled with historical imagery, photographs, and a great-looking map of London’s Whitechapel district, I was frothing at the mouth.

Two and a half hours later, I wasn’t quite so thrilled. My brain was practically leaking out of my ears from trying to figure out which of the 195 spots on the board was Saucy Jack’s lair. I was worn out from calling out space numbers looking for clues, and I was over the process of moving the investigator pawns slowly around the board, trying to tighten the net and catch one of the world’s most notorious serial killers. In the end, he got away. We were one space behind him.

Letters from Whitechapel follows on from classic deduction titles such as Scotland Yard and Fury of Dracula but it is more complex than the former and not as thematic or dynamic as the latter. The idea is that one player takes on the role of the quarry (in this case, Jack the Ripper) and the other players move investigator pawns representing historical policemen investigating the Ripper crimes around the map attempting to piece together a trail while also blocking access to areas and reducing the potential number of possible locations where the killer may be. The designer’s previous title, Garibaldi, was another example of this kind of game but it was much smaller in scope.

The procedure is split into two multi-phased steps. The first is alluringly titled “Hell”. In this phase, the Ripper player places the “Wretched” (um, prostitute) tokens on the board while the investigators get to set up where their pawns will start. Both sides have bluff tokens, so there is some strategy to the setup. The Ripper player has the option of waiting to murder one of the Wretched and increase the amount of time that he will have to get from the scene of the crime to his predetermined hiding location, but at the expense of letting the investigators move the victim tokens. Once Jack decides to strike, the game enters “The Hunt”.

During The Hunt, Jack moves from one numbered space to another, writing the move down on a secret form. There are two types of expendable special move tokens, a carriage that will take him two spaces and an alleyway that lets him cut through a city block to obscure his path and escape pursuers or circumvent areas paths blocked by inspector pawns. The investigators move along squares between the numbered spaces and once all have moved, they may call out the numbered spaces they are adjacent to and Jack must indicate whether or not he’s been at that location. If the inspectors think that Jack is in an adjacent space, they can call for an arrest and possibly win the game. Jack has a limited number of turns to get back to his home location or he loses the game.

This process occurs over four nights, with the historical, single-night double murder mixing up things a bit. What happens over the course of the investigation is quite interesting. Players get a very thematic sense of putting together a trail and narrowing down the possibilities of where Jack is heading after the murders. Toward the end of the game, it can be quite tense for both sides as every move counts.