Secret Hitler Compare and Contrast with P1 Game 404: Alignment Not Found
The game that I chose for our playtest was called Secret Hitler (SH), created by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, and Tommy Maranges. The game’s setting is a physical board game. The game is set to have around 5 to 10 players, aged 13 and up, and is suitable for people who enjoy party games, social deduction, lying, and guessing/bluffing. Play time is 30 to 60 minutes.
I played Secret Hitler 3 times with the group. It was a very fun game, but it also made me nervous. You close your eyes at the start, then some players open their eyes and see who is a fascist and who is Hitler. Then you talk, vote for president and chancellor, and try to pass good laws or bad laws. If too many bad laws (fascist policies) come, the bad team wins.
I selected this game as part of our game’s comparison, also a potential “competitor”. To analyze the comparative and competitive differences, I would use The Molecule Chart as a framing model to navigate the elements. The framework includes People (analyzing market contexts and player behaviors), Problem (player needs and existing workarounds), and Solution (how the game addresses people’s needs).
People: Generally speaking, social deduction players are young adults accustomed to playing in a hybrid landscape today, including both digital spaces and in-person sessions. Since the market is filled with players who are very used to tech and modern designs, we need to design our game based on them. SH displays very aesthetic, appealing artwork that satisfies today’s social deduction players’ needs. Our game’s aesthetic design is similar to SH’s, but not as good as it is, and lacks the equivalent of polish.
Problem: The potential player’s problem that social deduction games (SH & our game) aim to address is how to create structured opportunities for deception, deduction, and social tension in a single sitting with minimal facilitation or control from the moderator. Just like how SH is carried out in a setting where “fascists/hitler” exist, our game setting is based on the ethical tensions of AI development, which is a hot topic today, for players to feel playable rather than purely theoretical. Different from SH, 404 adds the points element, which makes it not just about the player’s community but also about the player’s own self-interest.
Solution: Similar to 404, SH solves the problem for players by establishing a simple setup in which players close their eyes so the bad guys can recognize each other. Also, the policy cards of the game create more tension since you do not know if they are played on purpose. For our game, we want to not only use the “Train” or “Safe” as a way for players to express their opinions, but also to use public credit tokens to create a kind of “suspicion” if you want to gather tokens on your own. This adds a personal choice about greed. The game also has automatic pressure every round, so you cannot wait too long.
