Going to the Whitechapel

One of my favorite board games from younger days, one of my first tastes of the world beyond Monopoly and The Game of Life, was a game called Scotland Yard. In it, the players teamed up as a group of detectives against one player as "Mr. X." That game is still interesting, too. But I'm also interested in finding new games of a similar style, and one that's come into my play group is Letters from Whitechapel.

This is another team-against-a-single-player game. It's actually quite similar in theme, though more grisly -- one player is Jack the Ripper, who must kill five victims and escape to his hideout before the police can catch him. As in Scotland Yard, the solo player records his moves in secret, and the team tries to deduce his movements from a limited form of information they can gather.

In this game, that method of information gathering is a bit more compelling. Police players move their pawns to locations, and then get to ask if Jack has been "in a nearby area" (an adjacent space) on any earlier turn of the current round. At first, they know only the location where the body of the victim was discovered, but soon they can piece together a trail of clues indicating where Jack has fled. As the game plays out over several rounds, the players can narrow down their search to try to trap Jack before he reaches his hideout.

I've played it a handful of times now (most often as the police, but once as Jack), and I find the game to be very entertaining and flavorful. But it does have a shortcoming, and it lies in the balance of the rules between the two sides. Without going into great detail, if you play the game by the letter of the rules, there is a very cheesy strategy (widely discussed online) that makes it virtually impossible for the detectives to catch Jack and win the game.

Now among our group, we may have a more natural inclination to what the spirit of the game was intended to be, and no one has ever used this exploit (or maybe even thought to use it). But we've also never had Jack win either. And as many people on sites like Board Game Geek have discussed ways to modify the rules to balance things, they've thrown out suggestions that by and large are agreed to throw the balance too much in that direction -- making it virtually impossible for Jack to win.

In a sense, I'm not sure I can pass final judgment on the game until I've seen the bad guy win it once -- and win it "fairly" (by whatever modified game rules or simple sense of honor enables that). I certainly like playing the game, but whether it stays worthwhile in the long run will depend greatly on that.

So provisionally, I grade the game a B. If anyone out there has played it themselves and has suggestions for house rules, I'd love to hear them, because I certainly want to like the game even more.