For our first Critical Play, my friends and I played Secret Hitler. Secret Hitler is manufactured by Breaking Games and was designed by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, and Tommy Maranges; though it’s traditionally played as a board game, we played online through netgames.io. In terms of its formal elements, the players are unevenly assigned into two groups: the liberals and the fascists, with one of the fascists given the role of Hitler. The game’s player interaction pattern is a twist on team competition; the fascists are all made aware who the other fascists are as well as who Hitler is, while the liberals attempt to catch the fascists among them while simultaneously trying to successfully identify their fellow liberals in passing liberal policies. The game was extremely energetic and fun, with social deduction being at the forefront.
Secret Hitler emphasizes social deduction through various and specific mechanics created to generate designed conflict even as players begin to form hypotheses on who their fellow party members are. A few of these mechanics, though there are many more, are the fascist and liberal party designations as well as the Hitler role designation, the ability for fascists to know who the other fascists are, the voted upon role of chancellor and its designation by the president, forcing each player (as president) to choose a chancellor and eliminating certain players who’d been chosen recently as options, the mechanic of the president giving the chancellor voting cards, and the mechanic of providing the minority fascists with additional capabilities as they successfully pass fascist policies while remaining under the radar. Each of these mechanics are multifaceted; they can be manipulated by players in a multitude of ways and can either work against or with a player’s intent, making it exceedingly difficult for the others to, at any point, be completely sure of anyone else’s identity. The objective of the game for either party is to pass 6 policies for their party, or for the fascists, who are the minority team, to do that, or either elect Hitler as president after 3 fascist policies have been passed. This is a race objective, as each team attempts to reach 6 policies before the other. The liberal team also has the additional objective of identifying Hitler and assassinating Hitler at execution points in the game to immediately win. This is a chase objective played with strategy rather than with physical ability, as the liberals attempt to catch the fascists and Hitler while the fascists attempt to elude them.
The rule wherein the president chooses a chancellor, and then is given three cards to choose from in determining the choices of the chancellor, brings the opportunity for both the president and chancellor in whatever roles they play to confuse the other players in deducing their party affiliation. The fact that the policy passing is defined by the decision of two people rather than makes it fundamentally difficult for the rest of the group to identify who truly made the decision on whether the policy passed was fascist or liberal. This can be used to the advantage of the fascist team; for example, if the president is a fascist, they could choose a fellow fascist and attempt to pin the fascist policy passing on each other to make the liberals build trust in one of them, which could be useful later in the game. This happened early on in our second game, once we’d played for a while and gotten the hang of it. When two fascists collaborated in this way, we weren’t able to identify that they were both fascists until it was too late and they were about to pass the last fascist policy! There’s no way to know if this is occurring or if they are being honest; hence, this mechanic confuses the players up to the game’s conclusion (as it did in our case). Fascists would also often support each others’ statements in shifting blame unto other players, while liberals would attempt to establish party trust simply through deduction. This created a dynamic wherein liberal presenting fascists attempted to strategically infiltrate, or become integral to, the liberal circle, at any cost and not even necessarily with each other – quotes included “I only trust you [two], I know we’re all liberals” from a fascist to two known liberals (this worked!), “Just vote for anyone but N,” from a fascist about another fascist, placing themselves in the liberal in-group, and more.
When comparing Secret Hitler to other social deduction games, the Resistance comes to mind. I grew up playing the Resistance with my friends, and I find that the Resistance, wherein each round – equivalent to a policy being passed in Secret Hitler – is composed of multiple agents on a mission, creates further confusion than just the roles of president and chancellor in Secret Hitler. Because only these two players are pivotal in making the decision to pass a liberal or fascist policy, it can become evident far more quickly which of the two is lying if one of those people is involved in more than one policy decision, likely to occur in larger groups. This is perhaps a flaw of the game’s design and reveals where the Resistance may be a little stronger in keeping players engaged for longer and for providing a more difficult challenge for players in identifying who the impostors are. However, Secret Hitler is also differentiated from other social deduction games because of the direct conflict generated as a result of the complementary relationship of president and chancellor; in our game, there were often one-on-one standoffs between players when one was lying about being a fascist or not, one particularly standing out where I was convinced my friend S was also a liberal but a standoff with our friend J revealed her true identity in the last round of the game. This dynamic is definitely unique to Secret Hitler and is a strength in terms of the game’s sense of discovery – with every conflict between president and chancellor, players gather more information, leading to new suspicions and adding new energy to the game with every round and conversation. This is a clear example of the game’s designed mechanics, chosen by the designers themselves, generating a desired aesthetic. The one-on-one aspect of this conflict is also more dramatic and interpersonal as well, which I think was a clever design decision in keeping each individual member engaged throughout the entire game especially as the presidential duty rotated.
