For this week’s critical play, I played Secret Hitler with six of my friends. Secret Hitler was created by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter and Tommy Maranges, and published by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage. The game is intended for groups of 5-10 and can be played online, as a board game, or with a deck of cards.
In ‘Secret Hitler,’ the mechanics of hidden roles, policy enactment, voting, and reveals collectively emphasize social deduction by immersing players in a dynamic and suspenseful gameplay experience where they must rely on deduction, observation, and interpersonal skills to uncover hidden information and navigate the game. These mechanics work together to generate dynamics of trust and deception. While playing, the players experience a constant push and pull of trying to uncover who is lying while convincing the others they are innocent. The players are split into two teams of either fascists or liberals with one of the fascists also being “Hitler.” Each side wins by enacting their policies, or the fascists can win by electing Hitler as president, encouraging Hitler to remain a secret. One clever decision by the game designers was to allow the fascists to be cognizant of each other. It would add a completely new element to the game to require the fascists independently deduce their allies. I experienced this dynamic the first round we played and I was given Hitler. I was still unsure of the rules and didn’t know that I would be able to see who the other fascists were. This affected our game greatly because I also enjoyed the aspect of trying to read my friends’ facial expressions and act accordingly. After we had enacted policies, I tried to communicate that I should be elected president without revealing my identity. This is also how Secret Hitler differs from other games such as Among us. As opposed to there being one imposter, half of the players are “imposters” and they are consciously working together.
Another mechanic that enhances play is that every player gets the opportunity to enact policies. This allows the players to independently analyze everyone as they begin to build their case for innocence. It also enhances the suspicion dynamic because almost every player begins by enacting a liberal policy, which suggests that the policies do not determine their affiliation.
Since the players are split into fascists and liberals, the game exhibits team vs team and multilateral competition. The existence of the Secret Hitler establishes the objective of the game to be to outwit. The dynamics of deception and deduction are enacted when the players attempt to outwit each other to help their team. Additionally, the game is zero-sum because one side winning results in the other side losing. All of these intentionally placed elements work together to emphasize social deduction.
Secret Hitler allowed me to outwit my friends while keeping my identity a secret and also collaborating with other players. However, the game could be improved by incorporating another scenario for players to select fascist cards. Every time a fascist card was played, the immediate alibi was “I only had the option between 3 fascist cards!” This lie became old and hard to believe very quickly, and in turn it became obvious who the fascists were. If there were other avenues for fascist cards to be selected, such as drawing a card, it would add more suspicion to the game and further encourage social deduction.
Today I learned that Secret Hitler is the perfect game to play with your friends at 3pm on a sunny Monday. The mechanics of hidden roles, policy enactment, voting, and reveals collectively emphasize social deduction by encouraging players to use interpersonal skills to draw conclusions. While the game could benefit from another method of enacting policies, the current team dynamics and structure of the game optimize social deduction.
My friends and I having the best Monday of my life:
