Solve crime, explore feelings or retrace history with subscription boxes

You’ve got mail: You sign up and get a bunch of customised goodies at your door every month and these services are evolving.

Subscription boxes — where you sign up and get a bunch of customised goodies at your door every month — are evolving. New ones let you build your own serial killer stories, explore a feeling through emotional exercises, or retrace history through copies of archival letter and telegrams.

In your inbox, get evidence and clues to find who has committed a fictitious murder.(Shutterstock)

Hunt a Killer: This is a closed-ended six-month subscription. Players are given case details about the identity and background of a fictional murder victim, enmities, conflicts and a list of witnesses (who later ‘recount’ the crime, in ‘interviews’ with the local police).

Each month after that, you get a box of clues, a fresh batch of pages from the diary of a fictional detective, maps, newspaper clippings and ‘crime scene evidence’ (reports from ‘forensic teams’, etc). Each month’s box builds on the ones that came before. By the end of six months, you should have pieced together your own detective tale.

Your job is to scrutinise alibis and eventually come up with a killer who had reasonable means, motive and opportunity to have committed the crime.

Players are given case details about the identity and background of a fictional murder victim, enmities, conflicts and a list of witnesses.

If you’d like to continue after the first case, you can sign up for another six months and a new storyline with links to the previous story. ‘Solutions’ can be posted and discussed on the service’s private Facebook group.

Subscription charges are $30 a month (or about Rs 2,200) and boxes ship globally.

Feeling of the Month Club: Here, you are mailed a pack of envelopes containing different emotional exercises that allow you to introspect and work through feelings. November was the month of vulnerability. December is the month to explore fictional memories.

“I see this project as more artistic and poetic than therapeutic,” says founder Lillian Tong, a designer, researcher and strategist. “Each exercise engages the subscribers in various ways, whether it is drawing, cutting, tearing, or writing. Through the making process, subscribers create an artefact of their own feelings, which invites further introspection.”

Feeling of the month club sends you a pack of envelopes containing different emotional exercises that allow you to introspect and work through your own feelings.

The purpose is to open up a space in time for people to discover and reflect on how they really feel and explore feelings that they might be neglecting to acknowledge, through exercises that are explicit and tangible.

“Our exercises encourage people to be aware of their feelings, investigate them and care for them,” says Tong. Subscription charges are $12/month or about Rs 850.

Letterjoy: This service sends out, weekly, photocopies of original archived letters and telegrams sent out by people such as the Wright brothers, Einstein, Marie Curie and Winston Churchill.

They have monthly topics and themes include Presidents & the Press, Civil War Spies and Supreme Court Battles, with an emphasis on American events.

Retrace history through copies of archival letters and telegrams by Letterjoy.

Every letter is accompanied by a ‘postscript’ section that explains the context in which the letter was written, a bit about the author and recipient, and how the contents of the letter relate to other historic events of the time. They charge $49.99 or approximately Rs 3,500 for three months.