Critical Play: Secret Hitler

The new game that I am analyzing is Secret Hitler, the online version, but there’s also a board game version which I have not played before. This game was designed by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, Tommy Maranges and board game was illustrated by Mackenzie Schubert.

Just the name Secret Hitler insinuates that this is made for an audience with a mature humor or a keen knowledge of history. It’s set in pre-WWII Germany with two sides: the fascists and the liberals. Both sides are fighting to pass policies and elect (or not elect) Hitler as Chancellor. My hunch is that this is made for teenagers or older.

Here is a quick synopsis of the game. Each player is secretly assigned either fascist, liberal, and one player is Hitler. Liberals will always have the majority, but they don’t know who the other liberals are. The fascists know who Hitler is, but Hitler does not know their fellow fascists.

Every player gets a chance to be the President, and the President has the power to elect a Chancellor, but this must have a majority vote by the players in order to be elected Chancellor. The President also has a chance to discard one of three policies and give two other policies (which are cards that are either fascist or liberal) to the Chancellor. The Chancellor has the power to enact a policy. Depending on if the President is a fascist/liberal or if the Chancellor is a fascist/liberal, this leads to lots of twists and turns.

Opportunity to vote if vincenzo should be the next Chancellor to enact a policy.

Left: President’s choice to discard a policy. Right: Chancellor’s options to enact a policy.

There are two objectives depending on what party you are on. Liberals win by enacting five policies or killing Hitler. Fascists win by enacting six policies or if Hitler is elected after three policies are passed. The objective of this game is difficult to achieve when you don’t know who to trust or when you’re trying to hide your identity. This unique outwitting objective led to a lot of lies, deceptions, broken trust and lots and lots of laughter.

Along with the interesting objective, the unclear player relationships adds to the level of deception and distrust in this game. Liberals do not know who their allies are and must use their own judgement of who to elect as Chancellor. Sometimes liberals are put in unfortunate situations and must do something that might make them out to be a fascist, as seen in the above image to the right. All fascists know who their other teammates are and work together to make cases for why their liberals and why other people are fascists. This fantastic design of player relationships lead to lots of pointing fingers in our game and many lies.

I played this game with five other students in this class. It took me a while to completely understand the game and find a strategy of my own, but once the ball started rolling it was extremely fun. Lots of lies were thrown through the Discord like

“I only have two fascist cards! I have to enact a fascist act.”

with a quick response from someone saying

“That’s what a fascist would say!!”

It was a lot of fun trying to figure out who your fellow liberals were and sniff out those trying to sabotage the liberals.

With the mix of different objectives and unknown player relationships, here are examples of different strategies from different players during the round that I played:

• If you are the secret Hitler, you try your best to act like a liberal. An extreme way could be passing a liberal policy which is risky, but usually a clear way to gain trust.
• If you are a liberal, you don’t know who your friends are and immediately distrust everyone around you. I was a liberal and had to see how other players were acting. If people tried to blame others right away, I had my suspicions.
• If you are a President and a fascist, you try to gain the trust of others that you’re a liberal by pointing at someone and show that they’re a fascist. The strategy is to lie and lie and lie until you make it to the end. An example is if your three policies are ‘liberal, fascist, fascist’ you throw the liberal card away and give to the Chancellor who you think is liberal…putting the fascist blame on the Chancellor and not yourself.

After playing this game for the first time, I had a lot of fun. I was always a liberal so didn’t get the experience of working against the majority. It achieved its goal of having people question their relationships with their friends, making it a fun way to play with those you seem to trust in real life. I can see how this game can end in a lot of yelling…but in a good-spirited type of way :)

One major flaw as someone who played this game for the first time, it was difficult to remember the many different ways of winning and losing. There were a lot of different elements that add to the layers of deception, but as a new player, this made the game rather difficult. After the initial learning curve, this game can lead to lots of different playing strategies and ultimately be a fun game to play over and over again.