Letters From Whitechapel Vs Whitehall Mystery

Letters From Whitechapel Vs Whitehall Mystery – Queens: Career Shut Up and Sit Down fans may remember our 2013 Halloween special, where we reviewed a game called Letters from Whitechapel. It was a beautiful, hauntingly exciting game in which a player controls Jack the Ripper, facing off against a team of police players who hunt him down the streets of London like a wild animal. It would be in poor taste to say we were charmed by that box, but both Paul and I have to admit to being tempted. What a puzzle. What a board! what a fabulous

Fast-forward to 2017, and just a few months ago I raised my eyebrows at the announcement of a spin-off titled Whitehall Mystery. I read the preview articles and didn’t for the life of me know what I was supposed to be excited about.

Letters From Whitechapel Vs Whitehall Mystery

This week review copies of Whitehall Mystery emerged from the misty alleys of publisher Fantasy Flight and I gave it a play. And you know what? Now I have egg on my (bloody, murderous) face.

Whitehall Mystery: The Kotaku Review

A player in Whitehall Mystery takes on the role of a real killer who may or may not be Jack the Ripper and sits behind the curtain of their designated killer (pictured above). They need it because instead of placing their pawn on the game board, they are going to write down their moves as they knock it down invisibly. To win the game they must reach four spaces on the board known only to them, as if they were running around the devil’s baseball diamond.

The rest of the players will work as a team to find the killer. Each turn the killer moves one space and writes it down, then each police pawn moves either 0, 1 or 2 spaces, and then each man can

“Check for Clues”, which forces the killer to place a nicotine-colored disc in any space near Bobby that they pass, or Bobby can end their turn by “capturing” a certain circle. If the murderer is in that circle

Finally, the killer can’t get past the police and must complete their lap within a brutal time limit. And terrible! We have a fiendish game of guesswork and prediction for the police and a test of planning and misdirection for the killer.

Roll For Insight: Mechanical Intensity

This should all sound pretty familiar if you’ve played Fury of Dracula, or if you’ve played Letters from Whitechapel, it’s literally the same game.

At first glance, the Whitechapel-sized red box and broad board are understated. But actually, if we look a little closer we can see that the board has about 188 spaces to the original game’s 195. More significant downsizing is found elsewhere.

All unwanted rules relating to police patrols and the movement of victims have been cut, leaving Whitehall with a significantly shorter manual. And there’s more! The number of busy players in the original game has been reduced from 2-6 to 2-4,

And you know what? As I held this shrinking box in my hands, before I shrank, I thought of all the super-long, super-complicated hidden movement games in Whitechapel and Fury of Dracula, and I felt like I’d been shown the answer to a puzzle. I might even have said something like “off”.

A Question For Those That Have Played Both Whitehall Mystery And Letters From Whitechapel

What is the best thing about hidden movement games? Why, that would be hidden movement. It’s an exciting pitch, and that’s why we buy these games. We want to stay on the lam, and/or trap the fleeing friend with our deductions and predictions.

And yet Fury of Dracula can’t quite offer that, not really, because so much of the game is caught up in all its weird rules and complications. Meanwhile, Letters from Whitechapel feels a little incomplete because of its demands that you control 5 separate officer pawns. So either you have a full five players, during which your personal policeman is more likely to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have to roam across London while other people find exciting clues, or you have 2 or 3. Players control 5 policemen, which feels like a puzzle to be handed a police uniform that’s half-size too big. “Where did this last one of our two robo-cops search?” You ask “Was that alley, or…?”

With Whitehall, we have a comfortable, balanced experience where two or three police players can work together without waiting for someone to speak to them, and everyone’s pawn is important and influential, and each

Important and influential because the total number of moves made by the players in the game is cut in half.

Letters From Whitechapel Archivi

Does this make the game too short? God does not. If your police team likes to chat and theorize, you’re still looking at about two hours or more. So like everything else, Whitehall’s new length isn’t “Whitechapel but shorter”, it’s Whitechapel but

Which is not to say that everything is somehow simple. My favorite change is how designers Gabriel and Gianluca played with arranging the spaces on the board, complicating the puzzle without requiring players to learn any additional rules. Where the board in Whitechapel is a simple mesh of streets, Whitehall has a compact city block, a looping park (seen above) and even a few bridges, all of which await players to take on.

And all these districts will always be explored in each game because the assassin has to visit each of them in the order of their choice. It’s different enough from Whitechapel’s “go home every night” motif that the game feels fresh and exciting, and it gives the cops room to theorize from the game’s outset.

But maybe I’m spending too much time comparing these games? If the real mystery here is the mystery of what I’m talking about because you’ve never played a hidden movement game before, oh my god – place a pre-order for Whitehall Mystery at your friendly local game store.

Whitehall Mystery Board Game (dented), Hobbies & Toys, Toys & Games On Carousell

This game for the police team is a pleasant puzzle because it is alive. Simply finding a clue and placing a disc on the board feels dramatic, as it explodes into more questions—when were they here? In which direction were they traveling? And if you can answer any of these, you’ll have a better chance of being able to outrun the killer and stop them.

It’s one thing to solve a puzzle with your teeth tapped and fixed in place. It’s another thing to solve a puzzle because you predicted how your friend would move. But best of all, you’ll suddenly enjoy room dynamics as a reward for your efforts, where the player who’s been running rings around you for the past hour is suddenly using their limited number of special movement cards, scrambling like rats trying to escape traps in hansom cabs. .

But of course, you must try playing as an assassin, which is a completely different game and every bit as entertaining.

In turn you will realize how exciting hunting is, how delicious it is to hear all your friends talking about you when you are there, someone regularly outlines your exact plan… just for the sake of conversation the police do not know that if they work on this idea, they are the game. will win It’s the social equivalent of a patrolling policeman shining their lights in your face… and then walking past you, concentration on their forehead. This is amazing and it happens all the time.

Letters From Whitechapel Is A Tense Thriller With A Major Learning Curve

Obviously this game is going straight into my collection, but what I will say is that it’s slotting next to Whitechapel’s Letter like a shinier little sibling, rather than replacing it outright.

The big brother game still has a role whenever I have 5 or 6 people around the house who want to play a hidden movement game, but I also think that the two boxes

Different enough that if I had a great game of one, I doubt it would make me want to play the other (which would make me want to play the first again).

Have a problem with Whitehall Mystery? I can think of one, but honestly I had to struggle to come up with it in the face of my excitement about what a great product it is.

Whitehall Mystery Online

Like Whitechapel, a game at Whitehall can last a very volatile time. You could theoretically finish a game of it in 60 minutes, but if you enjoy chatting it could easily take three hours. So what if this is a burning issue for you? You are safe. I’m not telling you to buy this game. But I’m afraid the rest of you have no such excuse.

But if you keep an eye on SU&SD Twitter, we’ll be sure to let you know when it happens

This week on Shut Up and Sit Down, Tom is back from vacation and full