LogFAQs > #977474357

Apologies for the lack of updates. Work gets insanely busy this time of year for me and with family time over the holiday weekend I didn't have many free moments.

31. Secret Hitler
Expansions Played: N/A

All I'll say about the theme here is that it's never really been an issue for my group, but I completely understand why it would be for others and I would never tell anyone that they're wrong for that.

As far as the game itself goes... It definitely feels a little weird even ranking this sort of social deduction game on a list alongside something like Eldritch Horror. You have to really squint to see how they technically belong to the same hobby. But whatever, it's on BGG so I'm not going to be pedantic.

Roles are assigned randomly at the start of the game. "Liberals" are a majority, but don't know anyone else's affiliation. "Fascists" know who each other are and who "Hitler" is. "Hitler" also does not know anyone else's affiliation. Each round, everyone elects a President and a Chancellor who enact laws based on liberal and fascist policies drawn randomly from a deck that is weighted toward the latter. Liberals win if five liberal policies are enacted or Hitler is killed. Fascists win if six fascist policies are enacted or Hitler is elected Chancellor after three or more fascist policies.

Funnily enough, this game actually consistently delivers something that I complained about EH totally whiffing on: memorable moments where you can accurately recall every detail of that time when everything went completely, gloriously right or painfully, hilariously wrong. I saw my best friend have a complete head-in-hands crisis questioning the strength of his marriage (in a funny, lighthearted way) after his wife looked him dead in the eye repeatedly and managed to totally fool him in one game. Another game ended after a galaxy brain mind-meld between me and a friend of a friend that I hardly knew at all, where she as Hitler realized with impressive speed that I as a fascist was actively trying to covertly sabotage myself in a fashion where only she was in a position to call me out for it and put her above suspicion. Another saw two of our heavier drinker friends, both Liberals, obsessively and loudly tunnel on each other with Hitler suspicions for the entire game, only to fall ass backwards into a victory when the actual Hitler got a little too cute letting a Liberal policy through and basically got screwed over by luck of the draw afterwards.

I don't really have much more commentary about the game outside of applauding it for setting up a framework that encourages those sorts of moments. It's not all that innovative and there have definitely been some annoying games where the fascists won through very little fault of their own thanks to favorable draws. But it works as the beer-and-pretzels game for large groups that it's trying to be. Internal metas will develop and you'll eventually get used to the deck enough to be at least somewhat calculating if you want to be. And sometimes, honestly, it's just fun to point at your friends and yell and call them fascists. There's just something about it.

Collection Status and Future Outlook: I think my best friend and his wife own this, but it hasn't come out in a long time, mostly because our bigger friend gatherings are pretty rare these days. I think the game wears out its welcome fairly quickly if played a lot, but doing this writeup has kind of put me in the mood to bust it out for a round or three. As is the case with most games to have dropped so far, though, I don't imagine it'll ever rise much further.