For this week’s critical play about social deduction, my friends and I chose to play Secret Hitler, a social deduction board game created by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage in 2016 and designed by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter and Tommy Maranges. As a game of political intrigue and strategic depth, the board game is great for friend groups or families of 5-10 people and probably best suit for players 13+ years or older. This weekend was my first time playing Secret Hitler, and I played an online version of the game on secret-hitler.com. The online version had a simple interface that stayed true to the original board game’s rules and illustrations, and it had a super easy “setup”, which just included joining the host’s room with a given code.
I argue that Secret Hitler is a highly replayable game because of its durable mechanics that rely on randomized roles and card outcome probability, however the online version’s delivery of thrill and suspense are weakened due to the shifted dynamics in time pressure and fellowship through a computer or phone screen.
In the span of two hours, my group and I played around 8 times, each game varying in length from 20 minutes to less than 10 minutes. It was almost all our first time playing, but the game features fairly simple and intuitive mechanics that were easy for us to figure out with each other’s help. The essential rule of not revealing one’s randomly assigned identity (liberal/fascist/Hitler) was an essential requirement that needed to be followed throughout the course of the game. I found it interesting that unlike other social deduction games like Mafia, a player typically reveals their given role right after dying and can be considered to have left the “magic circle”. However, when I played with my group of 5, it was important that a player did not reveal their identity even after being executed because of the implications that might be made after knowing which role was eliminated and which would be left. This keeps all players contributing to the magic circle and invested in the game because a player’s team still shares the same goal of either electing Hitler to power or passing enough liberal policies.
The inability to intensify time pressure on the online version affected the thrill and fellowship of the game. Unlike a physical board game, where each player gets a clear visual of who has already voted or put down a policy, the online interface put less social pressure on a straggling voter, because it is harder to realize that you are the last vote needed, or that you are the current player choosing between policies. In a physical version, I assume that this policy choosing process would be much smoother because the time pressure would lead to implications of a player’s assigned role. Ex. the decision making for a fascist to strategically choose between 1 socialist and 2 fascist policies would probably have more delay compared to either role choosing between 3 policies of the same kind. This time delay, which is less apparent when users must look at a screen instead of the physical motion, gestures, and facial expressions of their potential opponents, reduces the suspense and fellowship created during the game. In the online version, you rely on keeping track of the thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons and the easily missed “vote missing” tags next to a player’s name. I would propose a brighter spotlight on these characteristics and a greater emphasis on which players are currently President and Chancellor to mimic the same social and time pressure that are essential to the dynamics of Secret Hitler.
The repetitive, yet varied outcomes of randomized roles are what kept my group coming back to play more rounds. Since different combinations of players are guaranteed to get different roles when you replay the game, the existing social dynamics between players that know each other well and players that don’t know each other too well present new challenges and opportunities to form alliances, ensuring that no two game plays are the same. As my group learned more about the game’s resources (the inventory of 6 liberal policy cards and 11 fascist policy cards in the deck), we started to use probability as a hint to whether or players players could be lying about their motivations in choice of policy. Learning to analyze card probabilities and discovering tactics to appear as a liberal player kept all of us reeled in for so many rounds of the game. Additionally, the fact that Secret Hitler is a zero-sum unilateral competition game, makes it so that some groups of people might feel unsatisfied after only playing the game once and losing. Therefore, the randomness of teams and roles allow for players to replay the game over and over, seeking new strategies over time: outwitting other players or being determined to fulfill the forbidden action of electing “Hitler” to power in this made up world.
