OUR REVIEW
Friends
Alter 16
Spezial
Metropolitan Murder Mystery
LETTERS FROM WHITECHAPEL
Chasing Jack the Ripper
The district of Whitechapel, beyond the mediaeval city walls and North of the river Thames, belongs to London’s East End. From about the middle of the 19th century onwards more and more immigrants settled here who hoped to find a better life in the capital of Great Britain, then a world power. Mostly Irish people, but to an increasing extent people from continental Europe, especially from the Eastern part, and among those a great number of Jews who had come from the Polish regions of tsarist Russia, as well as Englishmen sliding down the social ladder got stranded in this borough, ridden with misery, poverty, alcoholism and, as is often the case, accompanied by crime. Whoever happened to live here was unlikely to escape these circumstances. Those that could find any employment at all, even for a short time, were deemed lucky. Around 1880 a lot of working class people had to spend their lives as day-labourers. Even compared to imperial Vienna at the same time, where the miserable situation of labour immigration from Galicia (Eastern Europe) and Bohemia was bad as well, which contributed to the founding of the Social Democrat Labour Party under a poor people’s physician, Dr. Viktor Adler, the East End looked desperate. The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, who was in his early thirties and worked as a journalist and literary critic at the time, wrote sarcastically in a letter to the editor of „The Star“ newspaper on September 24th 1888, “Sir, Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question?“
Shaw referred to a series of extraordinarily brutal murders of pauperised women, most of them having had to rely on occasional prostitution to be able to survive – and pay for alcohol. Until February 1891 eleven victims were accounted for. All of these killings remained unsolved mysteries, moreover, different branches of police (Metropolitan Police, City Police, Scotland Yard) would not even agree whether these crimes had to be attributed to a single culprit or to more than one. The police files on the Whitechapel Murders were closed nonetheless in 1896. The idea that at least five of those eleven victims were to be blamed on a single serial killer prevailed, though. His nickname “Jack the Ripper” derives from a letter, the authenticity of which was doubted even in 1888 (the so called “Dear Boss”-letter of September 27th of the same year).
This fiend did not only make appearances in books non-fiction and fictitious alike (uncountable detective novels, and for example in Frank Wedekind’s play “Pandora’s Box”), music theatre (Alban Berg’s opera “Lulu”, based on Wedekind’s play), radio shows, film and television, but also, especially since 1988, one hundred years after those terrible events, in the world of game play. One remembers “Jack the Ripper” (Tom Loback and others, 1983), “Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper” (Mike Fitzgerald, 1998) or “Mr. Jack” (Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc, 2006).
Gabriele Mari transferred the Game of the Year of 1983, “Scotland Yard” (released in the same year through Ravensburger Publishers without naming the authors), in 2009 as “Mister X – A Chase Through Europe” from the City of London to continental Europe. The players still try to hunt down a mysterious criminal who moves almost invisibly, only dropping some clues to his whereabouts (used tube tickets, for example) time and again. Nowadays you can even find this secretive bloke on Vienna’s public transport system (in 2011, the search for Mr. X took place on June 21st).
Moreover, Mari took the basic mechanisms of “Scotland Yard” and applied them to “Letters from Whitechapel”, garnished with ingredients of the Whitechapel Murders. Up to five players take the roles of policemen on the beat during London’s Autumn of Terror of 1888 to follow the traces of the serial killer. Their task is to find the Ripper’s hideout, or better still to catch him on the run and thus prevent further murders. There are always five policemen on the streets hunting the killer, no matter what the number of actual players is. They have four chapters – called “Nights” – of the game’s storyline to get hold of the Ripper. On the game board that depicts the district of Whitechapel with all its crooked and hidden streets, paths and alleyways in the style of a yellowed city map, the Ripper secretly chooses one of the 199 numbered circular spaces to be his abode. He has to get there every night after killing a victim and he has no more than nineteen movement turns for this. First of all, though, he may select his prey within five turns. After he chose one of the white wooden pawns, representing distressed damsels, and thus determining the location of the crime as starting point for the chase, the policemen pawns may move. The Ripper moves (invisibly) from numbered space to any neighbouring numbered space, whereas the police move onto black square spaces. Circular and square spaces are found next to each other along black lines. The Ripper jots down the numbers of the spaces he moves on or over, beginning with the numbered space where the murder took place. After their movement turn (one or two squares), the policemen may ask the Ripper, whether he had moved on or over any neighbouring numbered space to detect his heading and eventually the hideout. The Ripper must answer truthfully. In addition to his regular one space moves, he may use a coach up to three times each night (moves him two spaces in a row, and this is the only way for the Ripper to get past a space where a policeman pawn is standing) or use two of his special movements (sneaking through buildings, thereby moving not necessarily along the black lines of the city map). Variants allow the Ripper to fool the police by playing false clues. Using these variants, he may block spaces and play up to three cards (one each night, starting with the second night) to move policemen pawns at his discretion; these cards are fashioned after actual notes received by press and police at the time, allegedly written by the killer, and that is where the game’s title comes from: “Lettere da Whitechapel” / “Letters from Whitechapel”.
Despite these options, the Ripper hardly stands a chance. During every test game, he was caught, usually even before the third night round started. The misproportion of five policemen against a single Jack the Ripper was too great, especially when considering that the police can easily encircle the Ripper, since without his coach he must not pass by spaces containing policemen, and he loses the game as well unless he reaches his hideout by the end of the night. What is morally justified in real life, and even may have saved lives in London at the end of the nineteenth century, turned out to be annoying in gaming terms.
Whereas the components of the game are exquisitely produced and the precisely written rules booklet even contains a summary of the historic events relating to those gruesome murders, “Letters from Whitechapel” is very disadvantageous to the Ripper player. Not even the beautiful game design is able to distract from this point. In addition, the game’s topic is really rather gross. When playing “Scotland Yard”, one could imagine the fugitive being a jewel robber or even a spy looking for secret weapons. In “Letters from Whitechapel” one is constantly reminded of hideous real life crimes. Presumably for this reason the German language edition is recommended for players “16 years and older” (English edition: 13+).
Martina & Martin Lhotzky, Marcus Steinwender
Players : 2-6
Age : 16+
Duration : 120+
Designer : Gabriele Mari, Gianluca Santopietro
Artist : Gianluca Santopietro
Price : ca. 40 Euro
Publisher : Nexus 2011
Web : www.hds-fantasy.de
Genre : Deduction game
Users : With friends
Version : de
Rules : de
In-game text : nein
Comments:
Extensive rules * usually ends rather suddenly * not well balanced
Compares to:
Scotland Yard, Fury of Dracula
Other editions: Lettera di Whitechapel, Nexus, Die Akte Whitechapel, Heidelberger
My rating:
3
Statement Martina, Martin & Marcus:
Beautiful game components design and well researched real life crime facts cannot distract from the main point of criticism – a big advantage for the police players that leaves no one really happy in the end.
Chance 0
Tactic 3
Strategy__ 2
Creativity 0
Knowledge 0
Memory 2
Communication 0
Interaction 3
Dexterity 0
Action 0