Episode 20 - Starting a Game Group and Letters From Whitechapel

Hello everyone! In this episode, we talk about our experience starting a game group. We also offer some vague advice on how to go about starting your own. We follow up with our review of the deduction game Letters From Whitechapel. Enjoy!

Letters from Whitechapel is a one-vs-all deduction game which pits Jack the Ripper against a team of London investigators.

The game board is an old-timey map of the Whitechapel district. Look at this board and tell me you don't feel like twirling a moustache. 

A close-up of the board. Jack will be moving from number-to-number while the police move dot-to-dot.

These are some of the pawns you will be using in the game. Notice the top-hatted Jack pieces, the white Wretched pawns and the colored policemen.

Jack will keep track of his movement on this pad behind a shield. Note the map of the boards drawn on the inside of the shield. This allows Jack to plan his move without staring directly at the board.

Setup of the game. The white tokens are placed by Jack and mark possible locations of the Wretched pawns. Black tokens are placed by the Head of Investigation and mark the possible starting locations of the police.

The board after the murder has been committed. The red token up in the top right marks the scene of the crime. The police pawns are placed on the board, and the hunt begins!

If the police do a good job, they will uncover Jack's trail. Yellow tokens mark spaces that the investigators have examined which Jack has been on at some point during the night.

Jack will use these special movement tokens to get the upper hand. The carriage allows Jack to move two spaces while the lantern allows him to move through a neighborhood. The tokens are placed on the time track to remind the investigators that they were used.

Fantasy Flight's trademark production values means that we get these tokens which are only used to randomly decide who will be head of investigation this round.