Day: 2 January 2016

Today has been a rather fun day, firstly we drove to Newcastle to see my adorable little nephew who was born on Christmas Eve, and as per usual I was a puddle of mush with him. We left him with a Serenity plush toy, just to make sure we have a future browncoat in the making.

Then I went along to Newcastle Gamers whilst the girls went up to see Lindsay’s granddad, and my awesome mates, Drew, Kyle and Steven (Geek Apocalypse) were there. Upon arrival we quickly began with a couple of games of Drew’s print and play version of Secret Hitler.

Secret Hitler is a secret identity deduction game, much like The Resistance or Warewolf, but is set in the days of the Weimar Republic, its written by Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity fame. The basics of the game are that you are secretly divided into two teams, liberals and fascists, with the fascists having Hitler on their team as well, in each round a player takes on the role of president and he nominates a chancellor, who the players then vote to accept or not. Once that is done, the president picks up three policy cards, and discards one, he hands the remaining two over to the chancellor who puts one into law.  These policies could be liberal or fascist policies, the aim of each side being to introduce more policies of their group, but there are more fascist policies out there than liberal, and fascist laws can be beneficial to the liberals as they allow them to for example identify which party a player belongs to, or allow the outgoing president to select his successor.

The aim for the fascist side is to introduce 5 fascist laws, or get Hitler into power once 3 fascist laws have been enacted, for the liberals, they need to pass 6 liberal policies into law, both are more difficult than they sound. I understand the subject matter may be uncomfortable for some people, but the theme fits, it shows us the dangers of slipping into fascism and how people like Hitler were able to take advantage of the Weimar Republic and its imperfect form of democracy.

Secret Hitler successfully Kickstarted at the end of 2015, and I am pleased to say I am a backer, in at a level which gets me the game in a lovely wooden box, but once its published in the second half of this year, I seriously recommend you take a look at it because there are serious lessons to be learned from Hitler’s rise to power even today, and to top it all off, it just so happens to be a brilliant game, that takes the idea of The Resistance and completely improves that games issues.

Whilst I was there I also got in a game of Superfight and Ladies and Gentlemen, games I played for the first time and very much enjoyed, particularly Ladies and Gentlemen which has been on my radar for some time now.