LogFAQs > #932109031

Anagram posted...

Have you played Chameleon? Will it be on a list?

I haven't. Assuming it's this game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/227072/chameleon), it sounds a lot like Spyfall, which I have played, but which I omitted on this list because I've played it almost exclusively on an app.

Great_Paul posted...

I guess Ive got the unpopular opinion where I like Secret Hitler better than Resistance.

Seems like most people ITT disagree, but tend to recognize that it has a lot of appeal in society. See these posts:

Naye745 posted...

also while i prefer resistance/avalon and think it's undoubtedly the superior game, there is something to secret hitler actually giving you actions to do (picking out policies) because it gives new players something to discuss and argue over. the more abstracted missions of resistance/avalon seem to be hard for a big group of new players to get a handle on, in some games i've had

NBIceman posted...

I wish my circle of friends was amenable to Secret Hitler alternatives, but they seem to really love calling people fascists for whatever reason. Oh well.

The fascist theme and the policy deck clearly make the game worse to me; however, they do appear to widen the mass market appeal of SH. I guess in the interest of explaining the game's popularity (and since I'm a bit more awake now), we could do a survey of its design decisions.

• The components give it a fairly clean aesthetic. (To me, this is WORSE because it costs 2x-3x as much as its predecessor, and the Role/Affiliation cards are a pain to separate. However, the President/Chancellor title plates are nice.)
• The fascism theme, which I hugely dislike, is really popular. People like calling each other Hitler/a fascist and love flipping the JA/NEIN cards, and sometimes saying it aloud. I find this annoying in general.
• The occasional win of killing or electing Hitler also provides a lot of high fives, though since HItler's best strategy is to play like a Liberal, I find this arbitrary and annoying too. One of the better SH memories I have is of HItler being President three separate times and mucking a Liberal policy every time.
• Teams of two are worse for depth of play, but easier to manage for new players.

The Policy Deck affects a whole multitude of how the game plays as well:

• The Chancellor's decision early on becomes trivial, making each election essentially a one-man team. There's so little benefit to discarding blue when you see both blue and red in an early round because the stakes are so low, and because
• There's a strong rubber-banding effect if a bunch of Liberal policies get passed a lot at first - it just becomes that much harder to draw Liberal policies afterward. The deck can therefore cause a ton of swinginess.
• Depth of argument can come down to two things: "I think you're a facist" or "It was the policy deck." This simplifies the decision space, making it less game-y but, again, easier to grasp.

Now I legitimately do think that the player powers granted to the President in case of fascist policies being enacted are pretty cool in theory - but in practice, I haven't seen it play out in particularly interesting ways.

Virtually every one of these decisions widens the game's appeal to those who would otherwise not be as into reading people, analyzing voting patterns, trying to search for social tics when people aren't featured, lobbying hard on who should be on the ticket and who shouldn't be. These are the things I tended to enjoy in social deduction games, so obviously SH feels gross to me.

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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness