Secret Hitler: Designing Conflict & High-Tension Moments

[Music] I'm Mike uh I made secret Hitler along with I co-designed it with Tommy mangie uh and then we produced it with uh Max tempkin and then Max Schubert did our art so I'm not the only guy but uh oh just start my thing um so secret Hiller how many of you raise your hands if you know the basic idea of secret Hiller how it works okay a lot of you and then uh keep your hand or up if you know Avalon also like just raise your hand if also played Avalon cuz I referenced that a lot okay so I'll get just give you a real background real quick um secret Hitler is a social deduction you can put your hand down no thanks um uh secret Hiller is a social deduction game it's a hidden rooll game so you start the game everyone gets a role uh you get to see it you can't show it to anybody else and then on in secret Hitler there's two teams there's liberals and fascists it's 1930s Germany um the Liberals don't get to have any extra information but at the start of the game during the night phase the fascists open their eyes identify each other so they know who the bad guys are they know who the good guys are Hitler

doesn't get to open his eyes in the bigger games but he puts his thumb up so his buddies know who he is and liberals don't know um just like real life uh I'm a liberal no uh anyway so the the way the game works every round there's a two-player government uh there's a president and Chancellor president placard moves around the table clockwise and then they nominated Chancellor so they're like a president vice president running m a little bit um and then they get to enact a policy and that policy is either fascist or liberal uh there's a policy deck of 11 fascist cards six liberal cards presid president draws three cards discards one face down passes the other two to the chancellor Chancellor also discards one face down and then uh the last one gets played face up and that's uh the card that everyone else gets to see that's the card that gets enacted uh so the president gets the most information Chancellor gets some information and everyone else only knows the card that comes out um and then they judge the two based on whatever happened uh so the Liberals want to pass Five liberal policies to win the game the fascists want to pass Six fascist policies to win the game and every time you pass a fascist policy president gets to do crazy cuz fascism is all

about like getting power for the government um so as fascism goes along uh it increases in danger and once the first three fascist policies have been played if you ever elect Hitler Chancellor after that point the game immediately ends in a fascist Victory because Hitler kills the president burns down the Reich dog and becomes fear for life um so that's the historically Accurate Way for the Hitler for fascists to win um and then those two bullets though are the the liberal antidote to to Hitler um if you pass a fascist policy on that uh bullet you get to shoot somebody if you shoot Hitler fascist die with him so um that once those three fascist policies are out it creates a really tense moment where Hitler is like trying to not die but also trying to get in into Power um so okay that's that's secret Hiller that's how it works uh now everyone knows how to play great um so social Jus games I'm not actually a board game guy um it's funny I've been coming to GDC for 10 years making video games and uh I finally make a board game and that's when they invite me to come talk um and I don't I I'm not super into board games uh and so when I I moved to Chicago a few years ago and started hanging out with the cards Against Humanity guys and

uh they got me into board games in a big way just hanging out with them they're immersed in the culture and I got into Avalon uh I had played werewolf before that so I knew kind of what social deduction was about but I hated werewolf werewolf's a bad game um but Avalon is beautiful and amazing game and it it really got me into the role playing aspect of it um which I thought was really really cool uh cuz I played D and D when I was a kid but when you're playing d and d and you're trying to act like a dwarf with a beard and a huge ax and like doing a weird voice and everyone else is just looking at you like you're an it's not a fun role playing challenge for me but with uh Avalon you your role playing is very very constrained if you're a bad player anyway if you're a good player you're not role playing you're just trying to sus out who's good and who's bad but the acting challenge of playing a bad character is so fun uh because it's so tightly constrained your actions are or just throw this guy under the bus or claim that you didn't play that bad card and it was really fun for me to try to get into that acting challenge cuz I'm actually really like pretty introverted dude and I don't uh lie to people or throw people under the bus in real life but when you're playing this game you

can mess around with really negative social actions and it's it's okay and you're still friends at the end of the game uh so that's I really fell in love with Avalon and actually uh Tommy and I were playing Avalon for about a month uh and we kind of agreed that it was mostly a perfect a perfect game uh because it's so simple there's so few moving parts that uh and but it creates this Rich experience of everyone kind of arguing and you really get into deep uh conversations with people and you really you know kind of get to know people really well through this game um we thought it was kind of perfect and couldn't be improved on uh and so as a challenge we were like hey let's make a better one um and we tried and you get to judge if we did or not but um so our early inspiration was really based on taking Avalon and then expanding on the things that we thought were cool about it and maybe taking away the things that we didn't like but uh the really initial early uh builds of it the ideas that we were tossing around were really pretty dry um it was all really focused on mechanics and it wasn't until I uh watched banded Brothers in like a one sitting uh after had given up on the

mechanics based approach that I started researching Hitler because uh Hitler was super interesting uh Germany was relatively liberal country and he used the Democratic uh system to turn it into a despotism essentially um a totalitarian country and uh I thought that was a really compelling interesting fertile ground for uh social deduction using the democratic system against itself um seemed like a compelling setting and a lot of historical based mechanics came directly out of that initial research um so like the president Chancellor relationship where the chancellor can betray the president that comes directly out of Hitler and Hindenburg and uh also the road to Fascism the government getting more powerful as more fascist policies come out came out of that historical uh slight Wikipedia research um so the the idea definitely came from the historical setting of it um so our our design focus and this is like me postmortem deciding what our design Focus was a little bit uh but it was definitely focused on individual experiences rather than creating a game that was like super

balanced or really uh accurate portrayal of History we wanted players who were playing the game to be having all the really intense moments really personal moments and interactions with other players um we wanted the drama to stay high throughout the whole game and keep accelerating until the end of the game we didn't want it to slow down if one team got too far ahead and it just turned into kind of a snowball we didn't want the other players to feel like it was kind of a foregone conclusion we wanted everyone to always feel like it was kind of on a knife's edge and we wanted them to tell a really fun story every time they played the game and it would come out a little bit differently each time and I didn't realize this until I was doing this talk but it really the game when you're playing it creates the typical plot structure of rising action to the climax and the climax this is the version for secret Hitler um but the the whole game is the rising action every time a fascist policy comes out it gets more intense people get more suspicious and worried about what's going to happen to the government until one side wins the other side wins and then the end of the game after it's over everyone sticks around no one really leaves the table they keep drinking they keep shouting about who was right who was wrong and usually it's

me cuz I always am right and no one ever trusts me um even though I'm very good at this game um so our our path was definitely focused on kind of two two facets kind of the the the one-on-one drama of interpersonal interactions um so we wanted to give a lot of moments where people could betray each other and so um and we also wanted to have the Hitler mechanic be a personal decision so when you're president you have and Hitler's active and can win the game you have to pick not Hitler and that's a very dramatic moment when especially when you have no confirmed that Hitlers to to pick from uh you have to pick out of this field of people one of them is definitely Hitler and will lose the game if you pick the wrong guy so it's a really tense moment for that person to go through but then we also wanted to focus on the dramatic tension throughout the whole game so Hitler is like this antagonist sh keep hitting the mic this hit Hitler is like this antagonist he's like uh Jaws he's kind of lurking in the darkness and he's always there and as the game goes he gets more and more important to the story and it creates uh it's a fun moment to try to I know

we also um the the policy deck that we use if you're familiar with the game the policy deck plays an important role in Shifting the balance of power between one team and the other team um and we also extend the climax so I'm get to get all these points later um but so the personal betrayal moments is the core of the game and that's that's the main thing that we took from Avalon uh I started playing Avalon and I really like the first mission which is just a two-player Mission uh so if you play Avalon it the as you go each Mission gets larger in size and and shrinks a little bit so the f the bad guys can kind of hide in the numbers but in that first mission it's just you and one one other person and when I started playing the game the The Meta for uh our player group had already resolved that oh the first mission is safe like you can't fail the first mission no one's ever going to fail that because it outs them immediately to the the good player if you have a a spy and a good player on that team you're never going to you know reveal yourself that quickly and so as kind of a a dick um I wanted to fail that initially just to mess with their meta um but also like I knew that if I went into

and you've seen D and C have worked with

a before and E and F have worked with B now you get a lot of information to what the puzzle is uh and the Liberals need they they don't necessarily know who is right on that side but if they get another couple interactions like that they sort of figure out the web of alliances that work in the game and so these direct one-on-one interactions create more information for the puzzle but you only get a few of them throughout the game usually people just claim they drew three fases cards when they do bad stuff um but it's really fun to piece together the the puzzle as a liberal um so the other big thing that we wanted to take from Avalon uh but repurpose because we thought it was strong but not necessarily perfect was the Avalon mechanic uh so in uh resistance Avalon uh Merlin is a character who uh knows who all the bad guys are he's on the good team but if he overplays his hand he can get shot at the end of the game and lose it for the good team so we really like that he was a strong power for the for the good guys um but also a vulnerability but we didn't like that his death came at the end of the game game so we wanted to um invert that a

little bit um because it felt a little cheap if you only had like three players on your team there's actually a good statistical chance that he'll just get shot at random and it feels a little cheap and not very earned um so for Hitler we inverted the concept and we took away all his information um and we also made him vulnerable throughout the whole game so that he can change the tide at any moment and it uh really ramped up the tension in the second half once he becomes active and he can die or get elected and win the game for either team uh it makes it more tense while the game still going on rather than kind of pulling the rug out of under the good team after they've won um and it also changes the Dynamics of who you can trust it makes the game into kind of a two act structure uh where in the First Act liberals and fascists are just trying to get on the board trying to do some stuff get some policies out and in the second half Liberals are locking it down and they have to figure out who is Hitler and if you've done too many liberal policies you actually look worse uh because you've been set up by the fascist team to to look like a good guy who's going to get elected um so okay uh those were the initial

ideas that we brought to the prototypes we took Avalon we we basically just took Avalon and added that um and it was already really fun and how did we know it was fun um so we we were play play testing in the cars Mano office and uh these guys were doing board games all day and then we invited them into the conference room and we bribed them with pizza because every prototype is terrible um and they would come and play for like another two hours and so they wouldn't leave the office for like 10 hours and then after the game was over they would stick around and keep telling stories of what had happened throughout game and they would love to regil you know fascists would talk about the close calls where they almost got caught uh liberals would love to admit mistakes and there was always one liberal who knew who all of the bad guys were and that was me and no one trusts me um uh but we had to figure out why it was working and uh Tommy and I took some time to focus focus down what our design was really um doing well and we thought that it was focusing on uh personal conflix and ramping up tension we weren't focusing on creating a really balanced game or uh one that definitely was uh synchronized in in actions we we

wanted one where everyone had options um and it it felt like it was a story that was kind of going back and forth and ended in a reasonable interesting conclusion for everybody um and the main way that we kept it interesting as we went was through the policy deck the policy deck is was originally going to be just a way for fascist to hide bad actions uh because in in Avalon you have the increasing team size but we wanted to create that really fun two-player Dynamic of President and Chancellor throughout the whole game so in order for fascist to have a way hide we needed to have them be able to blame it on random deck and we were initially just going to have a static uh draw chance um and we would replenish the deck after every round so it was only like 30% chance or whatever to draw a liberal policy but what we found uh was that if you let it deplete itself and let like if one team is gets ahead their cards come out of the deck too much it sets up a really interesting dramatic tension um so like you can have a board that looks like this where the Liberals are way ahead and a newb might be like oh well we only one policies is going to be easy

go back to the same guys we trust and we'll get this last one out but in reality the deck looks terrible um and you're going to have a full liberal team draw three fascist policies and that inevitably completely upsets the Trust balance um so this creates a really really interesting uh I know rubber banding a little bit uh that lets both teams always feel like they have a chance so fascists won't see this and be like well I guess the game's over I'm just going to like quit they will they will have that lie ready so when those three that fascist policy comes out they can jump on it and be like you guys did it I know you had to play that that fascist and and uh just create upset balance cuz fascists win when chaos takes over uh and so the deck is actually like the hardest thing that we had to balance um we started with six liberal cards and 10 fascist cards and we were just like throwing numbers at the wall we didn't know what we were doing um we knew we wanted six liberal policies so that you could miss one policy and still win the game uh but as far as the number of fascist policies we had no idea what we were doing as 10 seemed reasonable and it was fun at the

time uh but then we uh we added two more policies just to make the numbers round cuz that seemed like a good thing to do um and we played a game play test at the red line which is a pub in Chicago and it was a terrible night uh I played I got liberal I got deal liberal three times in a row and I had no idea what was going on uh it was Madness we lost every game I don't even think it was close and I was so desponded by it that on the ride home after the game I thought secret Hitler might be just completely broken or the policy deck was a bad idea in general because I know that Randomness has the potential to create bad streaks and I thought that maybe it was inevitable that people were going to have a terrible experience playing secret Hiller uh but then we changed it to 6 to 11 and it was fine so I don't know why 611 is the good balance um but sometimes I mean that's the value of play test is you try it out and you see what works um and my brain wants to add that last fascist policy to make it a nice even Square but it's this one

works and it's just magic and I'm not going to question it anymore um and it has all sorts of interesting uh issues like once you you played the first five cards there's two left that you can never see and you have to reshuffle them just a lot of weird natural uh issues that make card counting difficult and make the game more interesting so I have no idea why this works but it works really well um so Hitler Hitler is the bad guy of our game he's a very bad man we don't want him to win um and Hitler as an act of threat is the most important part of the second Act of the game the the the game really works in two acts um as the action is slowly Rising after each fascist policy all of a sudden Hitler becomes active and everyone locks down and has to figure out who's good and who's bad because if you put the wrong guy in government you lose the game instantly and that's the main way that fascists win is by electing Hitler um so maintaining that threat of of Hitler as the bad guy was a very important part of keeping the second game second half of the game interesting because the Liberals will do everything to try to circumvent Hitler's power and and lock down power within a small number of trusted players and so

we had to do a few things to keep that uh keep them reaching out to new players and always trying different uh new chancellors because that moment where you elect someone Chancellor and at the table has to ask them are you Hitler and you wait for them to say yes or no is the most tense part of the game and we wanted them to have to do that a few times uh because it's just it's fun to have to have them shout in your face yes um or say no in a relieving way um so the ways we did that were presidential succession Works in a as a natural way of like eventually one of your confirmed not Hitler chancellors will have to play as a president um and then you have to find someone else we also have the term limits which uh were put in place specifically to keep people from going back to The Well of trusted liberals each time so if you're the president or Chancellor on the last round you can't be elected the next round so you have to keep reaching out to new players and then also the fascists usually have the assassination power because you have to play a fascist policy to be able to do it and they will often kill confirm not Hitlers in order to gain get another chance at putting Hitler on the on the

chancellorship ticket um so the final thing that we did to make sure oh going so fast um the final thing that we did to make sure that the game stayed interesting up until the end of the game was to extend the runway um with the veto power so the veto power is really interesting um in that it gives liberals a last chance once the the the fifth fascist policies has been played they get an opportunity to throw away a triple fascist draw um which is great for the Liberals because they if you get a full liberal team it's like oh dope we can get rid of this these cards we don't have to lose keep going because we don't ever want the deck to win the game for the fascists we want the fascists to get in there but the problem is that now they have to pick a new team those two players who are clearly liberal who just played or just got rid of three fascist cards they're unavailable now thanks to term limits so you have to once again go out into the Wilderness and find new players because we and then you're almost always going to pick at least one fascist for that team and uh because that's way more fun to have a fascist actually screw over a player because when you have our

Dream game was that you get to the last possible veto and you have a liberal president and a fascist Chancellor and the president's like hey we can beo and and the Chan like no man I'm going to win the game uh and we we dreamt about that for like a month before we finally actually got to play it because it's pretty rare but um it's a lot of fun so and so we always wanted the game to focus on giving fascist a chance to actually betray people we didn't want it to be a natural loss for liberals and we didn't want the Liberals just trip over themselves we want the fascist get in the game and actually screw people over um so that's the that's the graph of the tension once people realize they can veto um okay so the the general takeaway that I want you to come from with this talk is that I don't think that you can actually be good at seceret Hiller um we had a lot of people early on on Board Game Geek telling us that Avalon was way better because it's more deterministic and the randomness of secret Hiller makes it impossible to win and I at first disagreed and was angry uh but now

I actually kind of agree uh because I don't I don't think that you can be good because the game is so random and there's so much self-balancing going on uh that if you get too far ahead you're eventually going to get rubber banded back uh and almost every time you play the game it conforms to this plot structure which I just think is more interesting though um and that's that's the real takeaway is that I don't think being good at secret Hitler is important uh I think as long as people play the game and they have fun and they have a really engaging experience and they come away with this interesting story story of twists and turns and betrayals all that that's all that matters is the experience um whether or not you have a good win ratio is not interesting we've thought about how could you do a secret Hiller tournament and I don't think it's possible uh one because the teams are inbalanced but um two it's just we focused on creating interesting experiences for you to go through um not necessarily a chess-like deterministic game and that's why I think it's good um that's secret Hiller uh and that's all I got

okay we have a lot of time for questions because I totally ran through that so if anybody has any happy to answer hey uh so I'm curious since you guys obviously built the game and worked on the rules if you encountered this in play testing but uh we've seen a lot especially with new players the person explaining the rules always organically seems to be like the most trustworthy even though they're often not yeah and is that something that you felt was a problem with the meta or something you just was like this is kind of cool let's run with it and not try to fix it I I think it's inevitable I do think that okay I I actually had that covered in the talk a little bit but I I do think you can be good at secret Hitler in that you know the probabilities a little bit and you know how the game works and I played at P when we were uh initially prototyping it and I played like 30 games and I only lost one uh because I was just playing with new players so that's definitely true and that's definitely an issue and and it's especially true for me like I know that

better than everyone else cuz I can just pull out the I made this game you know excuse um but I don't I don't know if it's a problem or not I don't know if that's solvable uh I didn't try to solve it um we just tried to make the rules as clear as possible and we have like the video explaining the rules so we're hoping that people get it to speed quickly and I think after like two or three games people kind of glom on to the idea well enough that they know what kind of Lies they make or what kind of Lies they can't make yeah that that kind of Fades when you have a group that plays together for a little bit but it seems like with new players it's always the case that people gravitate towards trusting guy that explain and we had like we were playing at the cards office so we had tons of board game interested people to play with and so we definitely got tunnel vision we were focusing on experience level play like first and foremost like the people at the office have played hundreds of times so I definitely didn't think too much about the new player experience cool thanks hi thanks for all the fun um I read in an article that you sent a copy of the game to the US senator is it true and have you heard back no uh Max is Max

is like kind of tied in with the Democratic he worked for Obama's ad or like the campaign uh so he has been hearing some stuff I've just been reading on slack while at GDC because we put that out on on Thursday so they haven't gotten the packages yet as far as I know but yeah we'll see I don't know thank you it's been crazy thanks so I actually really like the idea that you cannot be really good at secret Hitler so that the experience is more uh big my ego too like I I feel very good saying that um but what I'm wondering is uh what I'm wondering about is that you mentioned that the game self balances and so on so forth is there a relatively equal wi win ratio for it is yeah actually we we put out the print and play at during the kickstarter and we asked for people to reply back telling us who won and how how how often they won how often they played and like who won and we found out that uh early games Hitler gets killed sometimes but then after really early on Hitler never gets killed again after you played like two

times cuz Hitler figures out he should shut the hell up and then um and then we also found that it's a really even balance uh but I do think that some groups will swing fascist or liberal depending on what the individual skills are so I think overall like worldwide it's pretty balanced but that might not be true for your specific game group um but I don't really know like and we also don't care like if you're having fun I don't really care who wins I I I clearly want the Liberals to win but um okay thanks thanks hey so this is completely hypothetical but um you mentioned you've done a lot of game design in the computer or you know electronic space um thinking about games with secret or hidden roles uh it feels like a critical component of that is the in-person interaction totally um if you wanted to translate that experience into a computer game sort of you know remote interaction multiplayer situation what do you think are the critical things you would need to think about to make that work well well it's it's really really tough um honestly there are like three

different versions of Seeker Hitler that you can play online um one is on tabletop simulator it's very it's like the most popular thing on tabletop Sim right now and it's annoying because it's terrible to play without facial recognition like reading another player is a huge part of social deduction um I think that you can get away with other forms of information secret Hitler but like it's why would you I don't even know why you play that so we don't like support that or want to do that and I guess there's like VR the eye tracking stuff that's coming out maybe some facial recognition stuff but without that face I don't want to play it so I'm thinking less about translating secret Hitler into a video game and more about designing a game specifically to support that kind of hidden roll stuff sure yeah well you got to get away on a lot of voice yeah stuff I don't know you could definitely design a game around it I'm sure like there there are plenty of games that are about hidden identities online but I haven't played a whole lot yeah thanks yeah sorry hi this is a question about matching theme to

mechanics sure so imagine it's April 2016 and you're making a game called secret Trump and uh there are six republican nominees but no one knows which one is the Donald Trump I I think we all knew who the Donald Trump was and everybody knew who Hitler was so what's your justification for doing a uh hidden nasty person in in a political Intrigue context so the metaphor is that like you people right now are saying well don't say Trump is like Hitler Hitler put people in concentration camps and Trump hasn't done that yet well clearly we would like to identify Hitler before he puts people in concentration camps is what I feel like uh so clearly you're not going to know Hitler because he's named Adolf Hitler like the next one's not going to be named Al Hiller so the metaphor is like supposed to be a little a little more fluid than that in that this is really this game is really more about identifying liars and figuring out who is you know bullshitting you and just trying to tell you what you want to

hear um and that's what we hope people get from it is to be a little more skeptical about the political process like at the highest level that's what I want people to take and I don't expect us to change the world or anything cool so that was an awesome talk thank you very much uh I remember when secret Hitler came out it just exploded onto the scene and everybody who was playing board games was like you've absolutely got to play this game was there any kind of deliberate marketing strategy that you use to get it out uh Cards Against Humanity Facebook page if you don't know Max tempkin is a co-creator Cards Against Humanity and he's a friend of mine and he did wanted to help me make the game uh and so he used his might and like the senator sending games to Senators like that's we've got a ton of press in the past week uh from that and that's all Max is a genius that like he put a a Super Bowl ad was just a potato that's had advertisement on it so like he's crazy and comes up with insane ideas and and stunts um so that's I don't have it nobody I can't reproduce Max tempkin for

everyone else can I ask one quick followup which is uh the pr and play do you think that helped cuz there was lots of print and play then people were like I've got to buy this game yeah I think it's just good for spread like it's a terrible way to play uh and the components for the full game are so nice that I feel like it's a obvious upsell like you get real wooden placards they're so fun to throw around of people um so I I think it it it's lets the game spread and like cards Humanity did that too and they're hugely successful so I don't think it cuts into our sales at all I think it just spreads the word cool cheers thanks um yeah thanks for sharing it's really cool to see what went on behind the scenes um the process of making this game you say it's the first board game you've made yeah yeah um curious about like what did you discover about yourself and and in the process of this game and what what are you going to do next it was it was real natural like um the game just Design Concepts were I I just use the

same process I use in video games but the turnaround was just a day instead of like a week or a month to to try something out like we would we would play test it people would tell us it was and we're using a ton of like cars manity has published a bunch of games so we would just steal games from the shelf and like repurpose their components for our components um and so like the turnaround on changing an idea was so quick um it it was very similar to developing a video game in process but it was just so much faster that we got it done really really quickly like it it was a month then we had a really solid game um so yeah I don't know if I want to make another board game uh I haven't had any good ideas so that's kind of the the key for me I'm messing with VR now we'll see VR yeah so there was a there was a question earlier about what the Senators did and Max had tweeted about it just like literally minutes before you started your talk yeah I saw that yeah I was like I pitted staffers against one another on both sides of the aisle over who would get to keep their copy yeah I don't know if that means they got the packages already cuz apparent people were telling us they don't even open their packages uh and so we'll probably

just get them all back which is like that's fine with me we got a ton of press and we get our games back that's free press right but yeah it seems like he has connections on the hill so like yeah he'll actually know before anybody else really well done production quality is incredible yeah we're really happy with it um hello thank you for your talk it was very interesting thank you um uh we both agreed that I think the fun is the the most important factor uh so did you maybe spend more time on balance balancing fun instead of balancing the game yeah uh I probably ran through this in the talk too quickly but like our our Focus was like Tommy and I sat down we're like what are we going to focus on and it's clearly tens high tension moments like creating moments where you have to make a really difficult decision and you have a little bit of information on each side but you don't know which way to go yeah I mean because I think for me personally I think the playing the fascist side is maybe more interesting because you can create all

the chaos in the game I think it's more interesting for new players uh because lying is just immediately fun but I I think it's really satisfying to play as a liberal too just because the puzzle is kind of solvable like it's almost you almost have enough information to to put it together and I feel really good when I do that okay thank you very much thanks cool all right uh that seems like is it thanks everybody