My Secret Hitler Experience
Secret Hitler is a social deduction game created by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, and Tommy Maranges in 2016. For one subset of players, the liberals, the goal of the game is to find Hitler and stop a fascist takeover. For the fascists, it is the other way around. According to the box, the game is meant for all those aged 13+, but from my personal play experience, I would say that teenagers to young adults between the ages 15 to 28 would really enjoy the game. Secret Hitler is not novel; there are variations that have the similar bluffing and social deduction nature that is more suitable for a wider variety of players, like the classic Mafia or the even more complex Avalon. Mafia is the most general and easiest to pick up, whereas Secret Hitler is harder to teach, requires a board and cards, and the roles and features of the game make it less so meant to be a casual road trip game and more like a sit-down tabletop game. Not to mention that the players should probably know about fascism and German history.
It was interesting that Hitler was chosen as the common enemy for the game, but I also realize that to make the game more accessible to all, we can swap the common enemy to Trump (for Americans), Joseph Stalin, or to Kim Jong Un (for Koreans or other crowds), etc..
Two summers ago, I played at least 30 rounds of Secret Hitler. Living in Lantana for three weeks for the Stanford Summer Engineering Academy, my and my friends’ favorite past-time was playing Secret Hitler, especially in the wonderfully cool nighttime temperatures. Kudos to our friend Zhangyang for buying the board game for us!
My Communication Style and Group Role
Playing Secret Hitler taught me that I was not a confident liar so I would need to cover up my tracks with a bunch of extra words, that I have a chaotic personality, and that I tend to take the role of leader #2 when there are louder personalities on the table, and leader #1 when there are slightly less loud personalities, but that I will never be just quiet. I discovered that under pressure, I speak a lot and think a lot, and accusations fly around the table as I try to cover my tracks wherever I thought I leaked information.
I also learned that I have a stronger than average grasp of human intention and emotional intelligence. I feel that I am right more than most people and also often take a leadership role. I think this stems from my upbringing. I never played games as a kid, and was always talking to customers. I never really watched reels, and was always outside doing something. And I think the extra time spent in the real world made me more sensitive to people and understanding their intentions.
I noticed I take risk evenly regardless of what I get. When elected as Chancellor or President, I still make risks when discarding fascist or liberal cards regardless of if I am fascist or liberal, because my strategy is to hide any information about me, since I would rather be ambiguous. But that also makes my chances of being assassinated rather in the air as well.
How Secret Hitler Is Built
The game has several key mechanical elements that create tension and competition which in turn reveal players’ natural tendencies. First, players receive hidden roles as liberals, fascists, or Hitler himself (shown above, but people would not reveal actually). The fascists will get the chance to look at who the other fascists are, but the liberals do not. This creates an uneven distribution of information amongst the people in the table that forces some to bluff and some to ask lateral questions to try to figure out what is happening. This makes the game more interesting, and there are many decision opportunities where people can act and try to gain edge, such as the recurring election process where players vote on President-Chancellor pairs who then get to enact policies. (I think one thing that could make the game more interesting is to separate the fascist role into known fascists and unknown fascists, basically choosing one of the fascists to be unknown, as in that fascist does not know the other fascists and the other fascists do not know them. That could cause an even more uneven knowledge heirarchy.)
Another interesting mechanic of the game is that wood fascist/liberal deck has much more fascist than liberal cards, which creates inevitable suspicion because sometime liberals have no choice but to pass fascist cards. But we cannot always trust what the player said. This allows actual fascists to deny that they are fascist by blaming the cards. Since this is an opportunity to disguise oneself, I often used this to my advantage, being super lenient on myself for flipping fascist card and being super harsh and making accusations when someone else does, which makes the game really exciting! As more fascist policies are enacted, there are special things like investigation or assassinations which increase the stakes. I think all these mechanics is almost genius, creating a very intricate, and closer to real-world kind of game than mafia. Which in my opinion, makes it much more addicting.
How Players Interact With The Game
After playing a couple of rounds, we all got better at the game, and a couple of key dynamics emerge. So, everyone’s wish is to be seen as liberal because that is how you survive as a liberal and that is how you can support Hitler as a fascist and stay in the game longer. For some players, it is super easy to see that they are liberal. And so, some groups start to form based on the initial decisions that we all watch that tell us who is super likely to be liberal. As the game progresses, for the ambiguous people (which I learned that I often was), the game constantly tests emotional intelligence and ability to read people. I like to be in an exciting position, and don’t mind if I lose, so I love being fascist especially, and try to maintain making risky moves no matter what my position is, so that every consecutive game with this crowd is super fun. But there are multiple kinds of players!
The Emotional Experience of the Game
The mechanics and dynamics of Secret Hitler come together to create an intense and mentally challenging game. We learn a lot about ourselves, our friends, and how to make strategies to fool people and win as a team of half the crowd. My friends and I had a blast and we played multiple times each day, and never got tired of it, so this game is really thoughtfully ideated. I learned that my favorite part is that sometimes when you get together with friends, you run out of things to say, but a game like Secret Hitlers instantly gives you guys something to bond about.
On Ethics
Lying in games like Secret Hitler doesn’t feel wrong to me because everyone knows deception is part of the game, and that the game won’t be fun without lying. When my friends and I during SSEA gathered to play the game, we immediately know that it is a space where normal social rules are temporarily paused, and that helped us learn more about each other than just knowing each other in the classroom or dorm living setting. I think what makes lying okay in this context is consent because those who are uncomfortable can opt out and play ping-pong or pool instead. One thing I did notice was that the game’s theme sometimes made people uncomfortable when they were accused of being “fascist” or “Hitler” which shows that even in games, certain topics carry emotional weight that goes beyond just playing. That’s why earlier in this writing piece, I suggested that we can make a game where different enemies can be chosen, like the Evil Witch in Cinderella could be a relatively neutral option! The above is an example that someone made, but with “Dark Lord.”
