I was helping out with the youth group again tonight and one of the things we did was play a game called ‘Secret Hitler’, although we played the ‘Secret Trump’ version. Pick any political leader you would think of as somewhere on a spectrum from scary to nefarious and have away with it (I did wonder about secret Boris….).

In the game you split into two uneven teams, essentially goodies and baddies. However, you don’t know who is on which team nor who represents the leader of the ‘baddies’, as that is done by handing out playing cards. We had red for Republicans, black for Democrats and a red ace to represent the Donald. Every one closes their eyes and the baddies have a chance to look and see who else is on their side; in our group of six, there were two baddies and four clueless goodies. Eyes open again and, each round, one player takes a turn to be a chancellor who proposes a president. If the other players accept this choice (by simple vote), the chancellor picks three cards representing policies and passes two of them to the president, who discards one and plays the other face up. The goodies win with five black policies played; the baddies need six. However, there are more baddie policies than good and, if the notorious leader happens to be selected as president and gets to play a baddie policy when there are at least three others on the table, that also wins them the game. After the policy has been revealed, you can ask chancellor and president which cards they had but there is no compunction on them to tell the truth.

In our game, the baddies won both rounds. That was my team on the second round. One player started to suspect me so I didn’t get voted as president but then it was my turn to be chancellor and I ‘innocently’ nominated the player opposite me, who was still widely trusted… and actually the one with the Trump card. Mwah hah hah!

Doing a quick search on my return home, it turns out you can actually buy the Secret Hitler game and that the rules themselves are published under an Creative Commons licence, so you can adapt and share it on a non-commercial basis (and giving credit and retaining the same restriction: BY-NC-SA 4.0). And there is also ‘Secret Trump’ expansion but no ‘Secret Boris’. Yet!