Your ability to enjoy the tabletop game Secret Hitler will likely depend on your ability to laugh as an increasingly impotent progressive coalition fails to halt the rise of fascism. No but seriously, it’s a fun party game.
Secret Hitler is brought to us by a number of designers including Cards Against Humanity‘s Max Temkin. It’s a party game for five to ten people, one of a rising number of tabletop games built around plotting, deception, and manipulation. It borrows heavily from Don Eskridge’s terrific The Resistance, as well as other “You think I’m this but I’m actually this” games like Battlestar Galactica and Mafia. I played a few games with some friends over the weekend and we had a very good, shouty time.
Secret Hitler production was funded via Kickstarter back in 2015, so you can just buy a boxed copy if you’d like. However, just as with Cards Against Humanity, the game’s creators encourage you to print out the cards and rules and make your own set. (Our friends took the latter option, with a variant I’ll discuss in a moment.)
Before the game, players are dealt face-down cards that divide them into two teams, Fascists and Liberals. One Fascist player is Hitler. The non-Hitler Fascists are allowed to covertly identify the other Fascists as well as Hitler, so they have all the information. The Liberals outnumber the Fascists, but at the start of the game they don’t know who’s who. Hitler also doesn’t know who’s a Fascist or who’s a Liberal, so he or she wants to identify the other Fascists without tipping anyone off.
I’ll summarize the rest of the rules below, but if you want a full rundown, here’s a tutorial narrated by the Internet’s Wil Wheaton:
Each round centres around two players in two government roles: The President and the Chancellor. The President title moves around the table each round. The current President player nominates a Chancellor, then everyone votes. The President’s nominee only becomes Chancellor if they’re voted in by a majority. After that, the Chancellor is in office for the round and can pass a policy chosen from two policy cards given to him or her by the President.
The Fascists want to pass a certain number of Fascist policies and/or elect Hitler chancellor, after which it’s game over. The Liberals want to pass a certain number of Liberal policies and/or assassinate Hitler, which also ends the game. The policies themselves are just tokens to be counted, but if you pass a certain number of Fascist policies, the government will get special powers. Pass two Fascist policies and the President can look at any player’s party affiliation. Pass four, and the President can assassinate someone, removing them from the game. In order to win by electing Hitler, the Fascists must have already passed three Fascist policies.
Here’s an example. It’s John’s turn to be President. He nominates Susan to be Chancellor. Everyone’s pretty sure that John is a Liberal, but no one’s quite sure about Susan. She might be a Fascist. After some discussion, enough people vote “Yes” on Susan that she becomes Chancellor. John then draws three policy cards, discards one without showing it to anyone, then hands the two remaining cards to Susan face-down. Susan passes a Fascist policy, which moves the Fascists one step closer to winning.
With that done, everyone starts talking. Why did Susan pass a Fascist policy? She claims John gave her two Fascist cards, so she had no choice. John claims he gave her one Fascist card and one Liberal card, so one of them is lying. Or maybe they’re both secret Fascists, and they’re trying to sow confusion? It’s time for another round, and everyone probably feels like they know less than they already did.
The friends we played with over the weekend had taken it upon themselves to print out and build their own custom version of Secret Hitler, using a variant that I’m sure will become popular among a subset of the American population over the months to come: Secret Trump. The teams were now Fascists and Progressives, the policies Progressive or Conservative, and the two government offices the Speaker of the House and the President. Instead of Hitler, the game-ending leader is Trump.
Subtle, I know.
Our friends even made custom cards with various famous historical figures from U.S. politics. Progressive characters included Eleanor Roosevelt and Barack Obama, while conservative characters included Dick Cheney and “The KKK.”
Whether you play Secret Hitler or Secret Trump (or Secret Obama?) the game is plenty fun and plenty stressful. You definitely will want to assemble a group of familiar friends for this one, since the parallels to our own political climate are impossible to ignore even if you haven’t made the connection explicit by reskinning the game.
You’re going to be spending a lot of time making bleak jokes about the rise of fascism and your failed attempts to present a unified progressive front, so you probably want to invite some friends with whom you’re comfortable doing that. (Like with so many things involving modern politics, alcohol helps.)
Secret Hitler‘s mechanics often reflect real-world situations to an impressive degree, which elevates it beyond a more straightforward game of deception. Liberals can advance fascist policies to give themselves more power when they’re in office, but they risk leaving that power in place for when Fascists take over. It’s very easy for the Fascists to exploit the Liberal team’s built-in lack of unity and to deliberately misconstrue what happened a few rounds ago.
Wait, who voted for Susan in round three? When did John say he might vote that way? Hang on, I never said that! If you’re accusing me, that makes YOU the fascist! During one game several of our Liberal players degenerated into finger-pointing and mistrust to the point that we started arguing over who was being the bigger BernieBro, all while the fascists happily plotted their ascension. You get the idea.
The parallels are enough to be exhausting, particularly if you don’t find what’s currently happening in Washington to be all that funny. If you’d rather laugh than cry, however, Secret Hitler is a solid way to kill an evening with your friends while awaiting the end times. Be sure to bring booze.
Comments
8 responses to “Secret Hitler, A Fascist Party Game That Hits Awfully Close To Home”
Bleh. These types of games when gaming with my brother’s gaming group always fall victim to our entire group’s uncannily good memory and awareness of each others’ poker faces.
It’d probably be good in a group you shared political beliefs with but don’t know too intimately to not get away with lying.
Haha, I know. I’d struggle because all of my friends and family already suspect that I am secret Hitler… and I’m not referring to the game! Let me play with unsuspecting strangers I say!
Actually, we’ve played dozens of rounds of it at work here and found that the better you learn to read each other the more fun the game gets, because you start reading into every little tell and remember every mistake and strange thing people say. The game’s best with a bigger group (6+) because Hitler doesn’t know who the fascists are, but the other fascists do know who Hitler is. No one has enough information to make a good decision.
One of the guys built a probability model for the chance of drawing a certain number of cards from a deck of a certain size if certain cards had been played, and this actually served to throw even more confusion into the game because low probability things do happen (i.e. “There’s only a 34% chance that you drew 3 fascist policies and passed two right now”) and you can end up tainting yourself early on and all you need is one player to suspect one other when they shouldn’t and it can throw the game to one side or the other.
It’s a really intense game though. So much shouting and bluffing and staring at each other and heavy concentration. A couple of rounds is enough to leave you feeling really drained.
Really good game overall. Highly recommend trying it. There’s a free print & play version and rules available on the website, so it’s nearly a zero-investment game to try out. Boxed copy is recommended though, the components are really nice.
What can often work well is getting a big group and mixing in some different people.
I’ve found with resistance and werewolf the best games happen when you have a couple of small factions who know each other very well, a few more casual acquaintances and then a few new people as outsiders.
Those different factions and knowledge of players causes cool fractures and splitting, especially when the people who really know each other are desperately convincing the new guy that they know Bob is a damn dirty traitor and we need to kill him now.
Played this on Tabletop Simulator with @cakesmith, @rize, @blaghman @sernobulus and @alexpants I think… Was a great party game I thought and I enjoyed it immensely.
Though my unpopular move of shooting @cakesmith didn’t go down well 😛
*squint*
Secret Trump?
Ain’t nothing secret about Trump!
He’s out there representin 24×7!
Plenty of secrets, it’s politics.
Definitely out there though, no question.