First thing's first, we need to learn how to set up the board for play. Inside the box, we can find: three separate boards, ten role cards, ten party cards, ten cards labelled Ja, ten cards labelled Nein, ten envelopes, a card labelled discard pile, a card labelled draw pile, eleven fascist policy tiles, six liberal policy tiles, a small blue token, a wooden placard labelled President, and a wooden placard labelled Chancellor.
I always start by matching role cards to their corresponding party cards (i.e. fascist with fascist, liberal with liberal, and a fascist party card with the Hitler role). I put a Ja and a Nein card with each of my sorted out roles before putting each of them in an envelope. I have always opted to store these cards like this, since it decreases set up time and helps you to store the pieces in an easier, more organized manner. Which of these role cards will be in use depends on the number of people you have playing the game. If you have 5 to 6 players, you need the envelope with the Hitler card in it, one of the envelopes with a fascist role in it, and the rest of the envelopes will need to have liberal roles in them. With 7 or 8 players, you need the envelope with the Hitler role in it, two envelopes containing fascist roles, and the rest of the envelopes need to contain liberal roles. For a 9 or 10 player game, you should have the envelope containing the Hitler role, all three envelopes containing fascist roles, and the rest of the envelopes should contain liberal roles. Store any unused envelopes in the box during gameplay to avoid confusion.
Table set up is fairly simple and depends on how many played you have for any given game. There are three double sided boards included in the box. On one side of each of these boards is labelled Liberal, while the other side is labelled Fascist. All of the liberal sides of the boards are identical, while the fascist sides are different. Each fascist board is labelled at the bottom of the board with the number of players and the board tells you whether or not Hitler is supposed to know who their fascist is. You need to determine which of the fascist boards is appropriate for the number of players that you have. Place the Fascist board in the middle of the table, within the reach of all of the players. Take another board and place it with the Liberal side up, facing the opposite side of the table as the fascist board, and place the little blue token and place it on the 0 circle on the election tracker section on this board. Take the card labelled Discard Pile and place it on one side of the boards, take the card labelled Draw Pile and place it on the opposite side of the boards. Now, you need to take the eleven fascist policy tiles and the six liberal policy tiles and shuffle them together to create the draw pile, placing the tiles face down on the card labelled Draw Pile.
Everyone still needs their roles. We already determined how many of each role we need to have, so now we need to take our envelopes containing the roles and shuffle them. Once our envelopes are nice and shuffled, we need to give one to every player. Each player should then remove just their Ja and Nein cards from the envelope and place the cards face down in front of them. Now you're all set up and ready to play Secret Hitler with your friends!
Where Can I Get Secret Hitler?
You can purchase a copy of Secret Hitler from an online retailer, like Amazon (where I got my copy) or from the creators themselves. The creator's have a completely free printable version on their website below.
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