Letters from Whitechapel - A Review.

Between the years of 1888 and 1891 a series of brutal slayings captivated the media of Victorian England. Unsolved to this day, the murders that shocked and terrified the downtrodden Whitechapel district, were perpetuated by a man who, in his shocking letters to the police, assumed the pseudonym “Jack the Ripper”. To this day, the unsolved nature of the crimes and the taunting correspondence from the infamous serial killer invoke a morbid curiosity in people, generating an unending stream of novels, movies, and speculation about what really happened under the soot filled skies over a century ago.

Letters from Whitechapel is a deduction based board game, designed by Gabriele Mari and Gianluca Santopietro, illustrated by Gianluca Santopietro, and published by Nexus Games. In the game, one player assumes the role of Jack the Ripper, who commits crimes, and attempts to avoid police detection through a mechanic of hidden movement across the winding labyrinth of streets and alleys. The other players portray the police detectives historically assigned to the Whitechapel Murder cases, and attempt to search out, and apprehend Jack through the use of logic and deduction.

The game takes place over the course of four nights, with a total of five murders committed. Although these numbers make for a tense and exciting game, they certainly aren’t arbitrary.  Of all of the murders that actually took place in the Whitechapel district while the police case was open, only five of them are considered to be canonically associated with Jack the Ripper, and of those five, two occurred on the same night, dubbed the “double event” by Jack’s own hand - and faithfully represented in the rules for Letters from Whitechapel.

This attention to detail in both the rules and components of the game makes it engrossing on a visual and intellectual level. So many of the rules and components have a solid grounding in the history of the Whitechapel Murder cases, and this adds greatly to the macabre theme of the game. From a mechanics standpoint, Letters from Whitechapel could have been a simple cops and robber themed game, but the art, components, and rules really bring 19^th century Whitechapel to life, and really pull the player into the history.

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