Target Audience: 5–10 players age 13+
I chose Secret Hitler as a point of comparison for Collective, the game my team is developing, because it essentially serves as our core framework without the economic system: the same hidden roles split into two asymmetrical factions, the same deck of policies voted on turn after turn, the same President proposing, the same vote deciding. What changes is the way the voting works. In Secret Hitler, everyone flips a “yes/no” card, and all players see everything. In Collective, you vote by spending coins, in silence, behind a screen, and every coin you drop slightly gives the player away. They are two different answers to the same design problem: how to make a vote with hidden roles dramatic.
The first thing that struck me was how well-balanced the deck is. 11 fascist policies versus 6 liberal ones. It seems like a minor difference, but it changes everything. In my third game, I was a liberal president; I drew three fascist cards in a row and had to pass two of them to the Chancellor, knowing that one would end up on the table no matter what. For the rest of the game, the other players accused me of being a fascist. I wasn’t…the deck’s math simply tricked me. The policy deck isn’t just a pile of cards—it’s a resource, which means it determnes what players are actually able to do and say each turn. By balancing the resource itself, Secret Hitler puts liberals on the defensive without writing a single rule like “liberals are worse.” Our deck in Collective is currently flat, 10 and 10. We’re leaving a huge design tool on the table when we could put a faction on a sloped playing field and let the behavior emerge on its own.
The sharpest contrast, however, becomes apparent during the vote, and this is where the MDA principles really come in handy for understanding what’s happening behind the scenes. In Secret Hitler, the mechanics involve a simultaneous public reveal. The resulting dynamic is one of immediate accountability: every “yes” and every “no” is visible, recorded, and held against you for the rest of the game. The aesthetic is drama through revelation: the most memorable moments of the game are when votes shift, and someone is exposed. It happened to me in one game: I had trusted a player who always voted with me, and on the fourth round he said ‘ja’ on a shady Chancellor who then played a fascist. In three seconds, the whole table knew whose side he was on. Collective does the same chain in reverse. The mechanic is a silent auction behind a screen. The dynamic is a constnt, low-level suspicion, with no clear accountability, because no one ever sees your vote in isolation—they only see the aggregated totals. The aesthetic is paranoia through opacity. In our latest playtest, the ability to flip zero coins without any sound produced exactly this: a persistent anxiety that Secret Hitler never achieves, because Secret Hitler only ratchets up the tension during moments of revelation.
This is also what sets Secret Hitler apart from Avalon and Resistance. The latter are purely deductive games: no deck, no escalation, just the same mission repeated endlessly. Secret Hitler, on the other hand, adds a policy deck and unlockable presidential powers, giving it a dramatic narrative arc that the others lack. Collective aims for a third way—deduction with a continuous economic layer.
Where Secret Hitler truly outshines us is in how it handles deadlocks. If the table rejects three governments in a row, the top card in the deck automatically takes office—and since the deck leans toward fascism, stalling systematically punishes the liberals. It’s an elegant trap: you can’t reject everything on principle because abstaining comes at a cost. I saw this happen when my table started rejecting goverments in a row and a fascist policy slipped through with nobody voting for it. Collective has the opposite problem and no solution. In the last playtest, we had a round where every voter put zero in both bowls because no one trusted anyone, and the session ended in a total stalemate. We need something similar: perhaps if the total number of coins falls below a threshold, the President decides unilaterally, or the policy at the top of the list is automatically approved.
Another area where Secret Hitler excels and we do not is presidential powers. As the fascists are eliminated, the President unlocks more powerful abilities: peeking at the deck, investigating a player, executing one. The game becomes richer in information and more brutal as the rounds progress. Right now, Collective feels flat; every turn has the same significance, and you can tell. Linking stronger political effects to the final third of the game would give us the crescendo we’re missing.
