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Feb 1st, 2017 at 14:06:10 - Secret Hitler (Other) |
In the few months I’ve had this game, it has quickly become one of my friend group’s favorite board games to play. In Secret Hitler, you and a group of friends reenact the politics of pre-WW2 Germany. Through the process of parliamentary procedure, a large team of liberal politicians compete against a small opposing team of fascists to implement either liberal or fascist policies.
Explanation:
Policy implementation is done by a forming a government (a president and a chancellor) which requires the approval of the majority of the players. The president of this government draws three cards from a policy deck, discards one face down, passes the two cards remaining to his chancellor who discards one and implements the other on a policy board. Once five liberal policies or six fascist policies are implemented on the board, the game is over and one of the teams wins.
It at first seems like the fascists are at a disadvantage. However while the liberal team is larger, the identity of fascist players is a secret known only to other fascists. In addition, the policy deck has six liberal and eleven fascist policies. Finally there is one person on the fascist team who is…. Secret Hitler. Each team has an alternate win condition besides just passing 5 or 6 policies. If Hitler is elected chancellor after 3 fascist policies are in place, the fascists instantly win. However, if the liberals are able to execute Hitler (an ability that is unlocked when 4 fascist policies get enacted) the liberals automatically win. To make things even more interesting, although Hitler is on the fascist team, he doesn’t know who the other fascists are.
At its heart Secret Hitler is a hidden-role game, which is a genre of board games that usually involves secret teams, hidden identities, and conflicting goals. While the games usually have boards, tokens, and cards, the main mechanic of each is primarily deception. That is, the ability of each player to deceive each other and see through each other’s deceptions is the core of the game. As a hidden-role game, I think Secret Hitler is very well polished and intelligently designed. To prepare for writing this I played a series of two games with a group of 8 players who were all new to the game.
Game session 1:
In the first game we played, I was on the liberal team. Having played the game before, I was very up front about asking people questions whenever any action seemed strange to me. Things like people voting no against certain government pairs without giving a good argument against it or presidents choosing suspicious chancellors to run alongside them for an election. After every policy was enacted I would ask what they drew from the deck or what they were handed (the cards they don’t choose are discarded face down so we have no clue what they are besides what they tell us they received.) Unfortunately for me however, my attempts to question people and my ensuing distrust of the players around me read as very fascist behavior to the other members of the liberal team. One other player took a similar approach to mine and we quickly became a sort of team during the game, which is valuable since to actually prevent a government you need a considerable amount of votes. The game became especially tense when each team was on the brink of winning and the execution ability had been unlocked. Now, I wasn’t just trying to stop governments from being formed because I didn’t trust them. I was trying to stop them because I suspected that if they were elected, they would execute me, silencing and removing me from the game. Luckily, I survived that game and the liberal team won. However to my surprise, nearly everyone I suspected of being a liberal was in fact a fascist. That player who I had teamed up with was Secret Hitler! He thought I was a fascist, and he wondered if I had been intentionally acting the way I had in order to win over Hitler’s trust. I wish I could attempt a ruse like that, but I honestly I was just as surprised as he was. He was the only player that game that I was almost 100% sure was a liberal.
Game session 2:
In the second game, I was on the fascist team. Not only that, but I was Hitler! To avoid the mistakes I made in the previous game, I decided to try to tone things back a bit. As Hitler, I didn’t know who I could or couldn’t trust and so I more or less tried to play as a liberal and forget about my secret allegiance until the timing was right. Early in the game however something occurred that completely threw me for a loop. On the second turn, as president, I passed a liberal and a fascist policy to my chancellor (a common tactic since it gives you information about their loyalty) and the player enacted the fascist policy. I was very confused. Even as a fascist that is something I would never do since it attracts so much attention to yourself and that isn’t something you want at all in the early game. He didn’t even try to defend himself to the group after it happened. So, in order to further solidify trust in me, I revealed that I had passed him a fascist and a liberal policy and he had chosen the fascist. Even in the face of accusations of being a fascist and possibly Hitler, this player didn’t defend themselves against any of it. They could have said I was lying or anything like that. I just had to assume at this point that they were just very bad at playing fascist. As the game progressed no one trusted that player and eventually they were executed, by a president who turned out to secretly be fascist in fact. Towards the end the game was in a deadlock, as no liberal had a strong grasp on who Hitler might be and if they approved the wrong government they might just lose instantly. The game has a special mechanic for situations like this though. If three different governments are not approved (that is they don’t receive a majority “Ja” vote) three times in a row, then the top card of the policy deck is just enacted without knowing what it will be. Since the majority of the deck is fascist policies (and at this point the ratio was 2 liberal cards to 7 fascist) this action will likely result in a fascist policy. So, with the help of another player I suspected was fascist, we stopped enough governments from being elected that the random card was passed. Unfortunately for us however, the card was liberal and they won. Allegiances were revealed, some of which were very surprising. The player who threw themselves under the bus right at the start was in fact liberal! They said they had a plan, and if confusing Hitler was the goal than I say it worked wonderfully.
Thoughts:
As I said earlier, Secret Hitler is one of my favorite board games in my collection right now. The game mechanics are simple to teach and understand, the artwork and wooden components are beautiful, and the game has deep potential for complex play without being overly complex to actually play. All a player has to do is vote yes or no each turn, and occasionally they choose a card from a selection of 2 or 3. Every few turns they become president and have to choose someone to be their chancellor. Once per game, a player might have to make an important choice like who to execute. In those three sentences I’ve explained almost the full scope of what the player can mechanically do in the game. Through those simple actions though a much more involved game of trust and distrust is built. The actions are simple, though they carry a weight that is anything but simple. A vote can be agonized over, and it most certainly will be scrutinized over by the other players.
Beyond what I appreciate about the elegance of its mechanics, I can’t deny that comedic value of accusing friends I know to honestly be pretty liberal of “secretly being Hitler.” While the accusations are part of fun, I also think they play into something subconscious the game uses against the players. The liberal players are incentivized to aggressively seek out the truth from other players. It benefits them to draw out votes as long as possible, to borderline interrogate other players, and to trust absolutely no one. All of this can easily read as “fascist” behavior. Fascist in the game on the other hand are incentivized to lay low, not make waves if possible, to be polite and assuage any doubts or paranoia. Fascist inherently feel less urgency in the game because they start with perfect information of everyone’s roles and the knowledge that fascist policies are more common than liberal. With a calm demeanor, a well-played fascist in this game acts in a manner that many of my friends and I would associate with liberalness. Just in the naming of the two teams, the developers of this game have already loaded a mechanic into the game. Players have to play against themselves in how they perceive behavior and actions and what they associate those actions with.
Overall I think Secret Hitler is a very fun game with the potential for deep and complex strategy. I want to play more games with people and see what sort of methods and behaviors develop over time once everyone gets used to the game. I can already tell that the tenth game of Secret Hitler you have with your friends will be drastically different from the first or second. I just hope it’s as enjoyable, if not more so.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 1st, 2017 at 14:08:32.
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