10 Board Games in 10 Days - Day 6 - Letters from Whitechapel

LETTERS FROM WHITECHAPEL

Fantasy Flight Games - 2011

picture from BoardGameGeek.com

Sometimes there are games where the theme feels tacked on. You could easily change the theme and the game would feel no different. Many Euro style games suffer from this. Agricola doesn’t really feel like you’re farming. You could change it to city planning or creating an airline empire or coin collecting and the effects of the game wouldn’t be altered much. Then there are games like Letters from Whitechapel where the theme and mechanics are so perfectly married that if you were to change even the slightest detail the game just wouldn’t be the same.

Letters from Whitechapel is “one versus many” style game. Set in London in the late 1880’s, one to five players control the London police force and one player controls the infamous Jack the Ripper. “Controls” is a funny word to use because there actually is no piece for Jack. This is the most interesting concept about the game, hidden player movement. While the police force has pawns they move around the board and tokens to place in an attempt to track Jack, the Jack player makes notes on a piece of paper marking Jack’s current location. The board is a depiction of the Whitechapel district of London, the primary location of Jack the Ripper’s murders. The map is marked with white circles containing numbers connected with dotted lines. Between the numbered circles are black squares. Jack moves around the board by marking a piece of paper on which circled number their invisible pawn sits while the police force physically move their pawns to the black squares. From the squares, the police may investigate the white circle locations to try to either catch Jack the Ripper or determine which way he may have gone.

As you can imagine, it is an intense game of cat and mouse. Each round starts off with a murder, which surprisingly maintains a bit of historical accuracy. Jack the Ripper committed at least 5 murders and the Jack player attempts to do the same in the approximate locations as the real Jack. It’s pretty morbid now that I think about it. As time goes on, the police search gets more intense as they get closer and closer to Jack. Jack isn’t without a few tricks up his sleeve to elude police, however. Despite these tricks, the police, if they keep their wits about them, are never too far behind Jack. There have been very few occasions where the game hasn’t produced excitement.

My favorite memory from playing Letters from Whitechapel has to be the time my friend Dave Caswell came down from Connecticut specifically to spend the night playing the game. Joe Donnelly was there, of course, as he was my trusty board game sidekick for many years. It was a hot Summer night but we had a fridge full of cold beers so we opted to play at the kitchen table for easy access. We turned off all the lights except for a desk lamp pointed right at the board and it created some amazing mood lighting. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of tiny pieces or cards with small print, so ample lighting isn’t really required. We spent probably 6 hours playing, rotating roles each game, seeing who was best at getting away with murder. I remember at one point, while I was acting as Jack, we took a break between rounds to just stand up and move around for a bit. Dave, still fully in character as a London detective, said “Joe, we have a murderer on our streets. He’s still out there and he has to be stopped,” punctuated with an open palm smack of the wall.

Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, that night was exactly 1 week and 7 years ago. When I first started this 10 Board Games in 10 Days project, I had intended it to just be blog posts about my favorite games. Maybe a brief description of the rules and why I like them so much. 6 days in to it, it’s been a serious journey down memory lane and has turned in to a sort of memoir. I think that’s the power of board games. Each game is an event. In a world that is controlled by technology, which I am not against at all, having a reason to get together and mess around with some analog games is an excellent break from the screen. The focus shifts from the tech to being present with each other. Video games are great for keeping in touch over distance, but my memories of amazing video game moments are few and far between. If nothing else, this blog series is proof that board games create excellent memories, more often than not.