I played Secret Hitler for the first time the other night. It was a lot of fun. We only played a total of four games, so I’m admittedly far from an expert, but I wanted to post a few thoughts I had about potential tells (i.e., behavioral patterns) in this game.
Silence and talkativeness. One major imbalance of beginner players is in talking a lot more when they’re the good guys (the liberals) than when they’re the bad guys (the fascists). The fascists are required to be deceptive and to pretend to be liberals, while the liberals have no motivation to be deceptive and so can just cut loose and be themselves. So it’s natural that the liberals will be more talkative in general, while the fascists will have to give their words more thought. (And by the way, this is one of the most common verbal patterns in poker; loquacious, loose speech from players making big bets will make strong hands more likely.)
One way this plays out with inexperienced, new players is that everyone starts out very exuberantly when they’re liberals, freely accusing people they think are fascists and having fun and being boisterous. Then, when those people have a round as a fascist, there’s a big change in their demeanor. They aren’t accusing people, they’re quiet, they’re more restrained in their actions. This points to the need to be behaviorally balanced from game to game and to think about your “meta-game” (your long term strategy); there is no downside to being loose/talkative as a liberal in one single game; the risk comes in over time, as you run the risk of giving away information in later games when you are a fascist.
Reserved behavior. For the same reasons as above, fascists can have reserved physical behaviors. One sign of this is looking down and not looking at others as much. In the fourth game we played, I set myself the challenge of trying to pick who the fascists were right out the gate. The game starts with a period with everyone’s eyes closed, during which the fascists open their eyes and learn who the fellow fascists are and who Hitler is. When we all opened our eyes (I was a liberal), I saw the two players at the end of the table looking down in a reserved, furtive way, while everyone else was looking around already energetically, having fun. Again, the liberals have no restraints on their behavior and are curious who might be fascist, while the fascists already know the big mystery. So not only are they more anxious and on-guard, they have less reason to be interested in what fellow players say or do. My guess turned out to be right and those two initially-looking-down players were two of the fascists.
While such clues of course wouldn’t be 100% accurate, any clues like this at the very beginning of the game would give you an initial clue as to who to be suspicious of. Because the liberal team starts out with no information, those initial small edges can be hugely important.
Pauses before playing cards. One of the gameplay elements is that the “President” looks at three policies (i.e., cards representing policies that are either liberal or fascist), discards one policy, and passes two to the Chancellor, who must then “enact” one of those policies. For example, a fascist President might look at two fascist policies and a liberal policy and pass the two fascist policies to the Chancellor, so that the Chancellor does not have a choice but to play a fascist policy. The President, if he chose, could then claim he passed the Chancellor a fascist and a liberal policy or, if he didn’t want to accuse the Chancellor, he could say he received all fascist policies and had no choice.
So one pattern here is just the length of time people take to consider when they look at the cards before playing them. For example, at one point someone gave away that they were fascist when someone passed them the two policies cards and then looked at them for a few seconds before finally playing a fascist card. This happened a couple times over the course of the evening. It pays to be balanced with your “bet-timing” (as we call it in poker).
Suspicious or inconsistent behavior. Verbal statement analysis plays a big role in this game; it is really at the heart of the game. In a typical game, there are so many interesting spots to analyze the meaning of people’s statements and try to deduce why they’d act that way. Just a very interesting psychological game that should help get reads in other games and real-world situations.
The most common giveaway of fascists is that they respond in halting or illogical ways. Keep in mind that liberals have no reason to act suspiciously; deception should not play a role for them (although very beginner players will do all sorts of strange things). So illogical responses and pauses in answering can quite accurately be regarded as reliable signs of being a fascist. Again, even if you’re not entirely sure of the pattern, unusual responses should count against those players until you have been given reason to trust them.
One common pattern that cropped up: it was common for fascists to get into mutually-exclusive one-of-us-is-lying situations. For example, the President passes that person one liberal and one fascist policy, and they enact a fascist policy and say they were passed two fascist policies. Therefore everyone knows one person is lying. In these situations it is common for the fascist to not defend themselves much. This isn’t actually that bad, assuming the player has been seen to act the same in past situations as a liberal, but most people are imbalanced here, and will speak up more to defend themselves and disparage the other person if the other person is actually the liar.
Much more telling: the fascist will often fail to speak up later in the game against the person who supposedly lied to them, even though, if they were staying true to character, they should know beyond a doubt that the other person is a fascist. So for fascists the lack of staying in convincing character can be a giveaway. This happened to me; I got into the above-described situation, and then a few minutes later, in my attempt to be an easy-going liberal, I forgot I was supposed to be certain about that specific person being a fascist. Whereas if I had actually been clearly lied about and maligned by that person I would not have forgotten it and would have kept bringing it up.
Game theory optimal approach
Every game has a game-theory optimal solution (in other words, an unexploitable, unbeatable-in-the-long-run approach for playing against very tough competition), and I started thinking about how this would apply to one’s behavior in Secret Hitler. It would almost certainly be (as with most games) to use the bare minimum of words necessary to play the game: asking the bare minimum of questions and responding as minimally as possible when one is asked questions. And this is because 1) all good players will know all the information present in the game thus far and the best ways to make use of it (so there is not much use in rehashing what has happened), and 2) all good players will know how to respond in the most optimal way to all questions (so therefore there is not much value to asking or answering questions).
One interesting factor is the ability of a President to privately investigate someone’s party membership; besides the fascists knowing who the other fascists are, this is the only privately held information in the game (unless I’m forgetting something else). If it weren’t for this, I’d be confident the GTO approach would be to not ask any questions and be completely silent throughout the game, but this hidden information creates an unusual dynamic where what the President chooses to do with that information would seem to have a lot of factors involved. Then again, if it is understood that a fascist will often accuse a liberal of being a fascist or say that a fellow fascist is a liberal, it might be possible that the unexploitable strategy might be to not say anything here either.
Worth pointing out, too: as with all games, these tells will most likely be reliable for less experienced players. Experienced players will be better at staying balanced and unreadable.
Again, I’ve only played this game four times and so please cut me slack if I’ve messed something up. If I did get something wrong, you think, or if you have thoughts on how behavior is used in this game, please let me know on the Contact page.
If you enjoyed this, you might like my post about reading tells in Cards Against Humanity.