Letters from Whitechapel to Receive Revised Edition from FFG

Fantasy Flight Games has revealed plans for a second quarter 2013 release of a revised edition of Letters from Whitechapel. The title was originally produced by now defunct Nexus Games and pits up to six players in a battle of bluffing and deduction as one takes on the role of the infamous Jack the Ripper while the other players look to track the murderer and bring him to justice. I have to say I’m a little surprised Ares Games didn’t take on the title, designed by Gabriele Mari and Gianluca Santopietro, but I’m sure FFG will spruce up the game plenty to expose the title to a much larger audience than the original version. Letters from Whitechapel will carry an MSRP of $59.95.

From FFG:

London, 1888. As soon as you step off the coach, you realize this is the wrong stop. A few minutes ago you were in the posh city center, but now crowded and smelly alleys branch off around you. Hawkers, shouting merchants, and dirty children covered in rags who run through the crowd and pull your jacket, begging for money… all you see is poverty and dreariness. Some people call this district hell.

Some others– less fortunate – call it home. Here, for a penny or less, you can see street acrobats and freak shows, or you can get drunk in one of the pubs. Prostitutes, those lonely wretched souls, haunt every street corner. These are his hunting grounds. Welcome to Whitechapel. Welcome to Jack the Ripper’s streets.

Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Letters from Whitechapel, the revised edition of Gabriele Mari and Gianluca Santopietro’s chilling board game of the hunt for history’s most notorious criminal!

Letters from Whitechapel is a thematically engrossing board game of deduction and bluffing in which one player takes the role of the infamous Jack the Ripper, while up to five other players are detectives working together to pursue him through Victorian London. After committing his horrible murders, Jack must outmaneuver the detectives in the tangled streets of the Whitechapel District.

Meanwhile, the detectives must use clever deduction and their superior numbers to hunt Jack the Ripper down before he can kill again or elude them forever.

High-Stakes Cat-and-Mouse

Played over four rounds, Letters from Whitechapel is an engaging game of cat-and-mouse. Each round, the player controlling Jack selects a victim, commits a grisly murder, then attempts to escape to his secret hideout before being apprehended by any of five pursuing investigators. As for the investigators themselves, they must watch and wait, springing to action when Jack strikes then working together to narrow down his true location and make an arrest.

To begin, the Jack player secretly chooses the location of his hideout, a numbered space on the board to which he must run after his nightly butchery. Jack writes the number of this location at the top of his move track sheet, on which he also records his movements each round. This all-important document will remain hidden behind Jack’s special screen throughout the game, masking his heinous activities from those who seek to apprehend him.

When Jack strikes, he removes one of the white Wretched pawns from the map, representing the murder of an unfortunate lady of the night. Suddenly, the scene of the murder becomes the starting point for a high-stakes race. As Jack attempts to elude police and make it back to his Hideout (ending the round in his favor), the police detectives search the spaces near the crime scene for clues to his trail. With skill, communication, and a bit of luck, the police detective players will gradually establish a radius surrounding the location of Jack’s hideout, before finally closing in and stopping him.

Will Jack escape justice, surviving to kill again, or can the police put a stop to history’s most notorious killer? Learn more at our Letters from Whitechapel website, then join the hunt early in the second quarter of 2013!

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...

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