Survivor: Peih-Gee, Michele Fitzgerald and more play an intense game of Secret Hitler

Who’s a fascist, who’s a liberal and who’s secretly Hitler? Survivor players find out!

At the core of Survivor is a game of social politics. Players need to work with people they can find agreeable to further their own agendas for some time but, after reaching a later stage in the game, might find that they can no longer work with that group or certain individuals. It’s better to work with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

With Survivor taking an indefinite break that might push past further than the expected Fall 2020 air date for season 41, any kind of content featuring the players is welcomed. Thankfully, Peih-Gee Law has been going all-in with online content this weekend, first appearing in the Survivor Sequester Mini on Saturday and following up with a game of Secret Hitler on Sunday.

You can catch the full video on demand of their game here, as Peih-Gee Law, Gabby Pascuzzi, Mari Takahashi, Eliza Orlins, Christian Hubicki, Rob Cesternino, Pete Yurkowski and Winners at War finalist Michele Fitzgerald joined creator of Secret Hitler, Max Temkin, in a game of social deception mixed with hidden roles.

Watch Secret Hitler with Survivors! from PeihGee on www.twitch.tv

Secret Hitler is a boardgame with a digital version that the castaways played on Zoom. Five to ten players will be randomly assigned one of three roles at the start; Liberal, Fascist, or Secret Hitler. The Liberal players have no idea who anybody’s roles are, while Fascist players know one another. Secret Hitler is also a Fascist but does not know who their teammates are.

Each round, in clockwise order, a President is named and nominates a Chancellor, to which all the players in the game can vote “Ja” or “Nein” in a vote to form the government. If that government is formed, the President draws three cards from a deck that begins mixed with six Liberal policy cards and 11 Fascist policy cards. The President then discards one and hands the other two to the Chancellor to pick a policy to pass.

The goal of Liberals is to pass five Liberal policies or, through late-game twists such as Presidents getting the option to “kill” another player if a Fascist policy is passed, kill Secret Hitler and win the game. The goal of Fascists is to pass six Fascist policies and sow chaos between the Liberal groups through gaslighting, meaning turning other players’ words around on them while having their fellow teammates’ backs.

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I won’t tell you which players have which roles, but the Survivor Secret Hitler game involves a high level of banter and entertainment. From certain players with surprising role reveals to Christian breaking out the whiteboard to break down the odds of receiving the first draw that they did, it’s an engaging time for all.

If you’re a regular player of this game, do not expect the highfalutin, meta-heavy strategy that makes playing in online public lobbies a venture in data management. Many of these players are enjoying for the first time, which makes their strategies potentially flawed and accurate (or sensical on paper but inaccurate assessments).

For example, often some of the Liberals step on each others’ toes because they do not know who is actually on their side. At other times, they might be giving a viscerally direct statement on the facts of the case while others have a hard time agreeing with the (correct) assessment.

The main takeaway, however, is that in a game with zero stakes other than a sense of accomplishment, these Survivor players’ minds are firing rapidly. You can see how their thought processes work both in earnest assessment and in trying to subvert others. Most importantly, however, the players are here to entertain an audience that came very close to peaking at over four-digits, and entertain us they did!

Secret Hitler marries the engagement value that the castaways were cast for in the first place with some of the gameplay mechanics that come with the CBS reality show, making for a wonderful time. Thankfully, it looks like Peih-Gee will be hosting more of these social deduction games on her Twitch channel in the future!