Letters From Whitechapel is actually two, very different, games. As Jack, each move you secretly make inches you tantalisingly closer to your goal, and feels like a juicy secret to hide from your opponents, but also adds to the risk of being discovered. You spend most of the game trying to be misleading, whilst still making efficient progress towards your objective of returning to your hideout, all whilst keeping in mind the often very imminent threat of capture. As the police, you instead have to play a game of logical deduction and guesswork. You begin by desperately trying to find a lead, starting in the vicinity of the latest mutilated corpse to be found on the streets of whitechapel.
If you manage to pick up a trail, you must then use your scant knowledge of where Jack has been so far this round, the special movement options he has used, and where you think he may be headed based on previous turns, to track down the hidden villain. A single correct guess with one of the police in the right place wins the game for the police, whereas if Jack can go four very long and bloody nights without being caught he escapes into the annals of history as the evil victor. Sound easy for the good guys?
Well, from an admittedly small sample size of around half a dozen of my own games, definitely not - the Jack in my box still sports an undefeated record. A quick read around the internet seems to bring this up as a common problem with the game, although as with everything on the web there is disagreement - I would perhaps question the guile of the players who don't regularly win with Jack, however. The beautiful centrepiece to the game is a sprawling map of the streets and back alleys of Whitechapel, and even cramped into the tightest of corners Jack will never find himself with less than three options for movement, and the vast majority of the time it will be be more than double that.
This means the search space for where he could possibly be expands at an incredible rate every turn in which no clue is found, and even once a clue has been found Jack will be moving at about the same speed as the police, or even faster when he uses one of his special movement options - this means that chasing the villain from behind is something of a fool's errand, but is unfortunately a necessity for at least one of the bobbies on the beat. Thankfully, having access to a force of five makes the police's job merely very difficult, rather than abjectly impossible, but it never feels like enough. One or two of the constabulary will inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of the board, and the remaining two or three just can't cover all the possible options. This means, to stand any chance at all, at some point the police must make a guess. And this is where the magic of Letters From Whitechapel really lies. All the hard crunchy logic will only get you so far, and at some point you have to listen to your gut, look into the face of evil (your friend sitting behind the Jack screen, smirking) and call them out. Are you at number 67, murderer?
As mentioned, so far in my experience on both sides of the screen, the answer has always been no, but nevertheless there is always immense tension in these moments. Or, more specifically for Jack, the moments where this doesn't happen - but it could have. Keeping calm under pressure is a powerful feeling in any game, and I've found most games of Letters From Whitechapel end with an outburst of talk between the two sides, as the tension spills out and the mystery is revealed, which is always a good feeling in games with hidden information.
All in all, the game feels good, but it may best to house rule it a little, both to even the balance, and to correct an unintuitive rule or two. It doesn't make much sense, for example, that Jack can wait in the first phase of each round, and the longer he waits, the longer he has to reach home. There are various fanmade house rules online, so if you are feeling the imablance after trying the game out, have a read around and maybe see if anything feels right for your group. Alternatively, although I haven't played it, there seems to be a lot of praise for Whitehall Mystery, a slimmed down, more streamlined follow up to Letters From Whitechapel which apparently fixes many of the problems in this game, so maybe check that out instead.
Also as noted in the summary, although the player count goes up to six (Jack, and one for each policeman), the game is much better suited to the lower end of the scale. The need to narrow such a huge range of possibilities down based on very little information make the police players's game require a lot of focus - any wrong deductions will lead to a wild goose chase that only furthers the confusion, and makes any chance of catching the villain vanishingly small. Coordinating movement and knowledge amongst many players adds even more difficulty to the game for the police players. On top of that, the tight coordination required makes the game unfortunately prone to quarterbacking, and it may be that only one or two of the police really end up playing the game. For the others, that can easily make Whitechapel into a very boring hour or two slog.
And that about wraps up a somewhat uncharacteristically long review. Perhaps if I had more experience with hidden movement games, the flaws of Letters From Whitechapel would be more of a problem, but despite its warts there is a place on my shelf, and my game table, for this thematic, tense, and intensely asymmetrical experience.