Overview
Five to ten players are secretly split into Liberals and Fascists, and one of the Fascists is Hitler. Each round the table elects a President and a Chancellor, and those two pass policy tiles between them in secret until one gets enacted. The deck is stacked against the Liberals, so when a Fascist policy lands, nobody can prove whether it came from a traitor or from bad luck. That gap is the game. We’ve spent a lot of loud nights arguing inside it.
Featured on: Best Social Deduction Board Games · Best Bluffing Board Games · Best Board Games for 6 Players · Best Board Games for 8 Players
See also: Avalon vs Secret Hitler · Best Games Like Secret Hitler · The Resistance: Avalon Review
Ryan’s Review
Likes
- A bad policy never proves anything, so there’s always room to keep arguing
- Every vote gets dangerous once three Fascist policies are on the board
- Pretty rewarding once you figure it out
- Presidential powers tempt even honest Liberals into passing Fascist policies
- Wooden placards, sealed envelopes and tiles make it feel like a real production
- You can print it free and try it before you spend anything
Dislikes
- A bit confusing at first, like most social deduction games: the rules, the roles, when to do what
- The name and theme will end the conversation for some people, and that’s fair
- Getting executed can leave you sitting silently for the rest of the game
- Weaker at five or six, where the two evil players know each other and it gets more transparent
- Around $45, when Avalon does a similar job for less
- Quiet players and bad liars can get steamrolled by the loudest storyteller
Getting It to the Table
An old Hexagamers write-up of this game contains the sentence “we can’t trust anything Ryan says in either of these roles.” It’s talking about President and Chancellor. I’m Ryan. No notes.
Secret Hitler made our original social deduction roundup back in 2017, when it was hard to find. An old Christmas list of ours left it off for exactly that reason and told people to buy a copy if they ever saw one at a decent price. The roundup sent people to the designers’ website to print their own. It’s a lot easier to buy now, but the name hasn’t gotten any easier to say out loud in a store.
Which makes it an odd game to recommend. I think it’s one of the best hidden-role games around. I’d still ask before putting it on the table.
Thoughts
The policy deck. There are 17 policy tiles: 11 Fascist and 6 Liberal. The President draws three, secretly discards one and hands two to the Chancellor, who discards one and enacts the other. You can’t talk or signal while this happens. An honest President can draw three Fascist tiles and have no real choice. So can a Chancellor handed two of them. “I had no choice” gets said constantly in this game, and it’s often true, which is maddening.
Every bad policy has three suspects. The rulebook spells it out in its strategy notes: when a Fascist policy comes up, it was the President, the Chancellor or the deck. Then each of them tells their version. Sometimes the President and Chancellor flatly contradict each other about what was in the hand, and at least one of them might be lying, unless they both are. Our old write-up put it best: there is SO MUCH ARGUING. In Avalon, a failed mission is hard evidence that someone on the team is evil. Here you never quite get enough to convict anyone, so the game rewards the better story. We break that difference down further in Avalon vs Secret Hitler.
Voting is public. Everyone flips a Ja! or Nein card at the same moment, including the two candidates. Those votes hang around all game. Three rejected governments in a row and the top tile of the deck gets enacted automatically, so stalling has a cost and Liberals can’t just vote no on everybody forever.
Powers go to whoever is President. The Fascist track hands out powers as it fills: investigate someone’s party card, peek at the deck, call a special election, execute a player. They go to the sitting President, on either team. A Liberal in that seat might actually want a Fascist policy to get an investigation, even though it pushes the game closer to disaster. Playing for your team isn’t always that clean, and neither is the information. The President can lie about what an investigation showed, and a Hitler card reads as plain Fascist on the party check.
After the third Fascist policy. Once three are out, electing Hitler Chancellor ends the game on the spot. The rulebook says this is how Fascists usually win, which is why Hitler’s job is so funny: act as Liberal as possible. The rulebook’s advice includes “Kiss babies.” From then on, every Chancellor vote could be the last one, and people stop voting yes on anyone. It does give the Liberals one solid piece of information, since any elected Chancellor who isn’t Hitler has to say so.
Executions. Liberals have their own kill shot: shoot Hitler and the game ends in their favour. Shoot anyone else and the table doesn’t learn which team just lost a player, so you’ve got a dead body and a brand new argument. The downside is real, though. An executed player can’t speak, vote or run for anything. Most groups shrug it off. Watching the endgame in silence isn’t everybody’s idea of a good night, so I’d warn your table upfront.
Learning it. Like most social deduction games, this one can be a bit confusing to figure out. There’s a lot to keep straight: the rules, the roles and when to do what, including a round order of nominating, voting, passing tiles and maybe using a power. You’re also trying to work out who’s lying while you do it. It’s ultimately pretty rewarding once you figure it out, so don’t judge it by how the rules feel at the start.
Player count. The official range is five to ten, and I’d aim for seven or more. At five or six, there’s one Fascist plus Hitler and they know each other from the start, so it moves quickly and it’s a little more transparent. It’s still good. At seven and up, the Fascists know Hitler but Hitler doesn’t know them, which makes a better game. Hitler plays on instinct, trusting teammates they can’t identify. More players also means more votes and claims to pick through.
The theme. You’re politicians in 1932 Germany and one player is Hitler. Meeple Like Us reads the game’s message as “You are responsible for this,” and I think that’s right: reasonable people hand over power one small concession at a time. They also call it “a little bit too smug for its own good,” and I can see that too. Whatever the intent, some people won’t want to play a game with this name, and they don’t owe you a debate about it. Our old write-up said you don’t need to know your group to play, because you never know who’s lying anyway. That’s true of the mechanics. It isn’t true of the box. Bring it to people you know, or ask first.
Components and price. It’s nicely made. You get wooden President and Chancellor placards, a sealed envelope for each player’s role and party cards, three different Fascist boards depending on player count, and proper tiles instead of cards. It runs about $45 on Amazon right now, which is real money for a game built on arguing. The game is released under a Creative Commons license, though, and the designers’ site has a free print-and-play version. They estimate about an hour with a printer and scissors, or about $5 at a print shop. Very few games let you find out if your group likes them for free. Print it first if you’re unsure.
Conclusion
Secret Hitler turns the fact that nobody can prove anything into an hour of escalating accusations, with a final third where one vote can end the game. Buy it if you have a steady group of seven or more who like reading faces and telling stories, who’ll stick with it past the confusing start, and if the theme won’t bother anyone. For a mixed crowd or a tighter budget, Avalon is the safer pick, and our games like Secret Hitler list has more options. It’s the one we pull out when we just want to yell at each other for an hour.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
