In games like D&D, you start by creating a character for yourself. The character has a background, a set of skills and a personality of their own

You Should Play Secret Hitler

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2021-05-31 06:00:08

In games like D&D, you start by creating a character for yourself. The character has a background, a set of skills and a personality of their own. Ideally, you should try to play characters with a different disposition than yours, and part of the enjoyment is acting like them, to the point of even occasionally making disastrous choices knowingly, because that’s what the character would do.

In Secret Hitler, you are but yourself and the only thing that changes is whether your goal is to subvert the German republic or to maintain democracy. This is in my opinion a beautiful inversion of what you can get out of role-playing games; one that has great teaching potential, especially when implemented in a game as elegant as Secret Hitler.

Players are secretly divided into two teams: the liberals, who have a majority, and the fascists, who are hidden to everyone but each other. If the liberals can learn to trust each other, they have enough votes to control the elections and save the day. But the fascists will say whatever it takes to get elected, advance their agenda, and win the game.

If you’ve never played Secret Hitler, watch the following 5-minute video to get an idea of the mechanics, which is necessary to better understand the rest of this blog post.

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