For this week’s critical play, I chose to play a bluffing game: Secret Hitler. This game was developed by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage LLC, and its target audience is young adults and up; this is especially a good game for those who enjoy social deduction and political themes. It is a board game designed for 5 to 10 people, with the objective of stopping a fascist takeover. In this game, the players are divided into liberals and fascists. Amongst the fascists, there is one person who is Hitler. The fascists are aware of each other’s identities, while the liberals aren’t. Through the game, the players are trying to pass policies; these may be fascist or liberal policies. The liberals win if they are able to enact five liberal policies or assassinate Hitler, and the fascists win if they are able to enact six fascist policies or elect Hitler as the Chancellor after three fascist policies have been enacted.
My experience playing this game highlighted that I am the type of person who is very open to taking risks for the thrill of winning the game. I played the game with four other people: the 247G CAs Eli and Haven, and my classmates Monica and Butch. In the beginning of the game, I was assigned a fascist, and Ellie was assigned Hitler. I had never played the game before, so I learned a lot of the rules as the game progressed. Each round, someone is assigned president and then they elect someone to be chancellor. They are then tasked with passing a policy together. These mechanics are very interesting, because, at certain points in the game, liberals might want to enact fascist policies and fascists might want to enact liberal policies. For liberals, this allows them to give the government more power so that they are able to kill fascists later; for fascists, this allows them to blend in with the liberals. It creates some really fun dynamics: challenge, as the liberals are competing against the fascists, but also fellowship, since both groups have to work together and learn to trust each other in order to win the game.
When it was my turn to be president, I chose Ellie to be my chancellor and we passed a fascist policy together. This drew a lot of attention to us because of the way I reacted—I acted surprised, which put some stress on Ellie, making it seem that it was their fault that we passed a fascist policy, but as a fascist it was my role to protect them. So I took it back, saying that we didn’t have a choice; I had pulled three fascist policies, so we had to implement one. This looked incredibly suspicious, and from that point on, everybody kind of knew who the fascists were.
We kept up the facade for a bit, until I took a bit of a crazy and risky initiative: give in to being fascists, and pretending to be Hitler myself to direct attention away from Ellie. This happened in a moment in which Ellie was president and they had the power to kill someone. At this point, I knew we had to go big or go home. It was a wild risk but it would be incredibly worth it if we managed to pull it off. Up to that point, I had acted very meek and innocent so as to not seem guilty, but at that moment I switched up my vibe; I straight up suggested killing someone who we had been confirmed to be a liberal, outing us as fascists. Someone then accused me of being Hitler, and Ellie and I locked eyes; we knew we were now on the same page with our strategy. I neither confirmed nor denied that accusation; I ignored it in a way that looked incredibly suspicious, allowing myself to look like a secret Hitler. After that, we were able to use the logic of the game to win; we delayed voting to the point that Ellie was able to kill one more liberal, and then when it was the last liberal’s turn to be president, they nominated Ellie instead of me to be chancellor, since they thought that they weren’t Hitler, which backfired. In turn, the fascists won the game!
Altogether, as I played, I was surprised to see how my character and role in the group played out to be a risk-taker since I do not tend to be that in real life! However, I feel that since this is a game and we are within the circle of Magic, I just wanted to seek the thrill of winning on an unexpected strategy. All in all, I turned out to be unafraid of making decisions on the spot, which showed me just how fun games of deception are for me.
I really enjoyed playing this game; it was quite different from other games I had played in the same genre, like Mafia for example. In Mafia, there are two killers who are trying to kill everyone else, so the size of the group gets progressively smaller. In Secret Hitler, the policies are passed by a combination of liberals and fascists, and it is everybody’s job to figure out how their decisions speak to their hidden role. Moreover, in Secret Hitler there is one Hitler that all the fascists are trying to protect, whereas in Mafia all the killers are equal. Having to protect Hitler made the game incredibly fun since we were able to play pretend with different characters and even able to reveal our identities without losing. While Mafia is a lot easier to play and explain the rules of, I enjoyed the dynamics of Secret Hitler more! There was so much more room for strategizing.
Ethics Portion:
Lying is viewed as morally incorrect in society because it can actively harm the people around you; for example, if you lie to someone about having stolen something from them, they will be upset about why their item is missing and have to replace it themself, which is not fair. That is why we have sayings like “honesty is the best policy.” However, lying is a core mechanic of games like Secret Hitler. I believe this to not be a wrong action. In other words, it is morally acceptable. This is because the players going into the game are aware that they are going to lie to each other. There are many ways in which lying makes the game more fun; one has to try to assess how good other people are at covering up the truth and try to use logic to deduce each player’s identity. In order to enjoy those perks, games establish lying as an expected part of their structure, so that when people play them, they know what they are signing up for. This presupposition makes it morally acceptable.
