Created by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, and Tommy Maranges in 2016, Secret Hitler is an analogue board game appealing to an audience of young adults and adults primarily, due to the game’s complexity and use of sensitive topics. Players (a group of 5-10) are divided into two groups, fascists and liberals, with one player assuming the role of Hitler, and tasked with pushing their teams’ agendas. The premise of the game is to have “liberals” find and stop Hitler and fascists from taking over. Secret Hitler emphasizes social deduction through information asymmetry and strategic ambiguity, achieved through formal elements of game design, especially procedures, rules, resources, conflict, objectives, and conclusion.
For a new player, Secret Hitler’s procedural design and comprehensive list of rules draw attention. There is much learning to be done by the players, which raises the bar of entry to the game, ensuring that every player has high amounts of intrinsic motivation to play. This seems to lead to lower rates of initial engagement, proved by the number of friends on my table who wanted to change games in the first few minutes, but longer-lasting periods of play and higher retention. Even though I observed players from other groups and games lose interest, once we got through the first 5 minutes of learning, our play group was completely engulfed in the game for until the very end. Other than the high bar of entry, created by the rules and procedures, the ambiguity of actions helped preserve high levels of engagement throughout, and was enabled by the restrictions and resources rapidly changing with every card/policy drawn. The resources in Secret Hitler were widely varying, especially regarding actions, information, and player power-ups, which kept up the unpredictability and the consequential need for strategizing. Offering ambiguous and new scenarios each round, Secret Hitler made good use of resource-fueled strategic ambiguity to encourage social deduction, leaving the players with only their skills to rely on in gauging the correct information and right strategy. This was exemplified by one of the players at our table, who deduced the patterns of eye contact between players to sway an early victory for liberals, only three rounds in.
The skew of information communicated between players, due to the ambiguity of the policies drawn and each player’s affiliation/objective, was a clear use of conflict and objectives to empower social deduction, and finally conclusion. The conflict was mainly caused by the dilemma of trust between players who anonymously belonged to opposing teams. This was again a product an information asymmetry, as there was no “valid” or confirmed information in the game regarding any player’s affiliations, and each player had different facts and evaluations to make decisions with. Each player belonging to one of the two teams with completely opposite and therefore conflicting interests, lies and truths mixed at every round and re-enforced the ambiguity to call for social deductions, rather than belief and trust in each other’s declarations. The multi-objective nature of the game (chase and capture regarding Hitler, the exploration of players and their roles/affiliations and respective motivations, and the race towards pushing policies that benefit the group of affiliation) lead to even more conflicts and higher number of potential outcomes, requiring even more rigorous strategies and therefore even stronger social deduction. This keeps the game energetic, interesting, and engaging, balancing out the chaos with structure and rules. There are not many recognizable patterns, and the outcomes are not predictable, emphasizing social deduction at each step to understand players’ motivations, objectives and conflicts, and potential outcomes. Therefore, the formal elements of Secret Hitler, especially procedures, rules, resources, conflict, objectives, and conclusion, create informational asymmetry and strategic ambiguity in the game, in turn significantly emphasizing the need for social deduction.
