Avalon vs Secret Hitler | Which Social Deduction Game to Buy

Buy The Resistance: Avalon for a family with kids 10 and up and for the cleanest social deduction at the table, and buy Secret Hitler for a group of adults who want the politics, the policy deck, and a bigger swing.

I am Spector, a dad to Alex, 7, and Emma, 10, and I have played both of these games in front of both children and a room of adults. They are the two social deduction games that get recommended to each other constantly, and the reason they keep being compared is that they look like the same game and are not.

Both give you a hidden team, a vote you can lose, and a dramatic reveal at the end. One of them runs on a policy deck and luck, the other runs on nothing but what people say and who was on which team. If you want the short answer before anything else, it is this. Avalon is the better game and the far easier family buy. Secret Hitler is the more dramatic political game, and it earns its keep for a specific kind of grown up table.

If you have not played either, start with our games like Secret Hitler list, which places both inside a wider shelf of hidden role games.

Avalon vs Secret Hitler at a Glance

Avalon is the cleaner and more honest social deduction game, and Secret Hitler is the louder political one. They are close on paper, both seat 5 to 10 players, both are rated 13 and up, and both finish inside an hour.

Feature	The Resistance: Avalon	Secret Hitler
Players	5 to 10	5 to 10
Recommended age	13 and up	13 and up
Play time	About 30 minutes	About 30 to 45 minutes
Publisher	Indie Boards and Cards, released 2012	Goat Wolf and Cabbage, released 2016
Teams	Good and Evil	Liberals and Fascists
Team size	Good 3 to 6 players, Evil 2 to 4, depending on table size	Liberals always outnumber the fascists, and Hitler counts as a fascist
Roles in every game	Merlin and the Assassin	Liberal, Fascist, and Hitler
Optional roles	Percival, Mordred, Morgana, and Oberon	None in the base game
How the roles are dealt	One character card face down per player, then a scripted reveal	Sealed envelopes holding a role card, a party card, and two ballots
Who knows what first	Evil players know each other, and Merlin knows every one of them	Fascists know each other and know Hitler, but at 7 to 10 players Hitler does not know the fascists
Random element	None once the cards are dealt	A policy deck of 17 tiles, 6 Liberal and 11 Fascist
Good side wins by	Passing three quests	Passing five Liberal policies or assassinating Hitler
Evil side wins by	Failing three quests, having five teams rejected, or naming Merlin	Passing six Fascist policies or electing Hitler Chancellor after three Fascist policies
Assassination	After three good quests, the Assassin names one Good player as Merlin	The Execution power removes one player, and the game ends if that player is Hitler
Player elimination	None	Executed players leave the table
Setup and teaching	About 5 minutes	About 10 to 15 minutes
Best for	Families, first time social deduction, and groups that hate luck	Adults who want politics, bigger swings, and a theme with weight

That table is the whole decision in one place. Everything below it is the detail behind each row, plus the honest verdict for a family night and for a night of adults who want a sharper game.

How the Roles Are Dealt: Character Cards Against Sealed Envelopes

Avalon deals one character card face down to each player and then runs a scripted eyes closed reveal, while Secret Hitler hands out sealed envelopes with four pieces in each one. That difference is small on the table and huge in what the game can do later.

In Avalon the deck is 14 character cards. Every game includes Merlin on the Good side and the Assassin on the Evil side, and the rest are Loyal Servants of Arthur and Minions of Mordred. Percival, Mordred, Morgana, and Oberon are optional extras that you can drop in or leave out. The Leader then reads a script: everyone closes their eyes, the Evil players open theirs and look around so they know each other, and Merlin opens their eyes and sees every Evil player. That single scripted minute hands two players perfect information and leaves the rest of the table guessing.

In Secret Hitler each player gets a sealed envelope with four items. There is a Secret Role card, a Party Membership card, a Ja! ballot and a Nein ballot. The role card says Liberal, Fascist, or Hitler, and the party card says Liberal or Fascist. Two cards exist so that when the President checks your loyalty, the check shows your party but never reveals that you are Hitler. The reveal script also changes with the table size. With 5 or 6 players the Fascists and Hitler all open their eyes and acknowledge each other. With 7 to 10 players only the Fascists who are not Hitler open their eyes, and Hitler keeps his eyes closed and gives a thumbs up so the others can note who he is.

• Similarities: Hidden teams, a vote to win, accusations, and one final reveal.
• Differences: Avalon deals one card and runs a reveal script, while Secret Hitler deals a four piece envelope and adds a party membership card to protect Hitler.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: Avalon keeps the setup to a single minute of scripted silence, which is why it starts faster.

Who Knows What on Turn One: Avalon Has No Spies

Avalon has no spies at all. It has two teams with character roles, and every Evil player knows every other Evil player. Secret Hitler also hands out team knowledge, but Hitler is the odd one out, because at 7 to 10 players the other fascists know exactly who he is while he has to work out who they are.

That difference changes how the two games feel in the first three minutes. In Avalon the Evil side is a club, and the only mystery on the Good side is Merlin. Merlin knows every Evil player except when Mordred is in play, and he has to point at them without pointing at them. Percival gets a matching piece of information: he sees Merlin and Morgana but not which is which, so a table with Percival runs a guessing game inside the guessing game. Morgana exists to make Percival wrong, and Oberon exists so that the Evil side does not fully know itself.

In Secret Hitler the Fascists are a club too, and Hitler is on the outside of it. Every Fascist knows the other Fascists, and with 5 or 6 players Hitler knows his one partner as well. In bigger games Hitler knows nothing except that he is on the team, so his job becomes convincing the table that he is a Liberal while quietly steering it toward an election that hands him the Chancellor seat. It is a genuinely different character from Avalon, and it is why a Secret Hitler Hitler plays so differently from an Avalon Assassin.

The rest of the role list in Secret Hitler is short on purpose. There are Liberals, ordinary Fascists, and Hitler, and that is the whole deck. Avalon’s role list is longer, which means a table can add complexity when it wants it and strip it back when it does not. The optional Lady of the Lake token is worth knowing about here, because it is Avalon’s answer to a policy peek. The player holding it is open information, and after the second, third, and fourth quest they may look at one player loyalty card. It is the closest thing Avalon has to information you buy with a power, and it costs nothing but table noise.

The Fascism Track and What a Policy Peek Really Costs

Secret Hitler runs on a policy deck of 17 tiles, 6 Liberal and 11 Fascist, and that track is the scoreboard. Avalon has no deck at all, and it scores quests. So the honest answer to what a policy peek costs is this: the peek is free in the rules and expensive in the table, because the President now knows something the rest of the table does not and has to lie about it.

Here is the routine. In every round the President draws the top three tiles from the policy deck, looks at them in secret, discards one face down, and hands the remaining two to the Chancellor. The Chancellor looks at those two, discards one, and enacts the last one face up. The President is a real editor of what gets passed, and both players are officially allowed to lie about what they saw. Nobody ever reveals a discarded tile, so the table is guessing at every single round.

On top of that routine sit the presidential powers, which are granted whenever a Fascist policy is passed. The President can investigate one player loyalty, call a special election to pick the next President, execute a player, or use the Policy Peek to secretly look at the top three tiles in the deck and put them back in order. That last one sounds like the big advantage and it usually is not, because the President already sees three tiles every round. The real cost of a peek is attention. The moment you use a power in front of a table, every eye turns to you, and from then on the reason you know what you know becomes the most interesting thing about you.

Avalon has no equivalent to peek at. Every fact about the game comes from people, and when a quest fails, everybody at the table learns the same thing at the same moment, which is that somebody on that team was Evil. In Avalon, information is never hidden behind a card you have to lie about, so all of the tension moves into the vote and into who gets believed.

How Suspected Spies Are Identified at the Table

In Avalon a failed quest is close to proof that somebody on that team was Evil, so the table learns from events. In Secret Hitler almost nothing proves anything except the one Investigation power, so the table learns from behaviour, and that is why the two games feel so different.

In Avalon the evidence is clean and it is public. The quest cards are passed out, played face down, collected and shuffled by the Leader, and revealed together. Good players must play success, Evil players may play either, so one Fail card fails the quest. There is one rule that keeps a failed quest from giving away too much, and that is the fourth quest. In games of 7 or more players, the fourth quest needs two Fail cards to fail, which means a failed fourth quest narrows the suspects sharply instead of handing the table a single name.

The other half of Avalon is the Merlin problem. Merlin knows the Evil players and has to guide the table without being singled out, and Percival is the one player trying to work out which of two Merlin lookalikes is the real Merlin. The interesting bit is that a good Merlin is not the loudest accuser at the table. He supports other people when they are right and adds just enough reasoning of his own, because a player who makes perfect accusations and never blinks is the easiest target for an Assassin.

In Secret Hitler the fascists are never identified by an event. The only hard information is the Investigation power, and it shows party membership only, never the special role, so the most you learn is that somebody is a Fascist, not that they are Hitler. Everything else is behaviour. Hitler is supposed to behave like a Liberal, vote along, avoid fights, and wait for the moment when the table is frightened enough to elect him Chancellor after three Fascist policies have passed. That is the whole difference in one line. In Secret Hitler the deduction is about process, because nothing ever happens that proves anything, and in Avalon the deduction is about events, because a failed quest is a fact. It is exactly why a Secret Hitler table sounds more like a parliament and an Avalon table sounds more like an interrogation.

How a Bad Guess Ends the Game

A bad guess in Avalon ends the game on the spot, and a bad execution in Secret Hitler does not end the game but removes a player from it. That single difference is the strongest argument for Avalon in a house with kids.

Avalon ends like this. After three good quests, the Evil players get one final chance, and the player holding the Assassin card names one Good player as Merlin. If the name is right, Evil wins the game. If the name is wrong, Good wins the game immediately. Nobody has been eliminated all night, every player voted in every round, and then the whole game rests on one sentence. It is the best ending in the genre because nothing about it is random.

Secret Hitler also has an assassination, but it is a power rather than a rule, and it comes with collateral. When the President uses the Execution power, they name one player at the table. If that player is Hitler, the Liberals win at once. If that player is not Hitler, the table is never told whether the executed player was Liberal or Fascist, the executed player is removed from the game, and they may not speak, vote, or run for office for the rest of the night. So a wrong execution in Secret Hitler does not end the story, it just shortens the table and hands the survivors more information than they had. A wrong assassination in Avalon ends everything, which makes the ending far sharper and far less forgiving.

Setup and Teaching Time for a Family and a New Group

Avalon takes about 5 minutes to set up and teach, and Secret Hitler takes about 10 to 15 minutes, because Secret Hitler has four presidential powers, a veto, and an election tracker to explain before the first vote.

Avalon setup is a chart lookup. Choose the tableau for your player count, hand out one character card each, and read the reveal script. The rulebook is eight pages and most groups are running the game correctly after the first quest, because the loop never changes: propose a team, vote, play a card, repeat. The one thing that catches new players is the vote tie, because a tie is a rejection, and new groups reject more teams than they should before they learn that the fifth rejected team in a round hands the win to Evil.

Secret Hitler setup is heavier. You need the right role distribution for the player count, you need to fill ten envelopes with four pieces each, you need the Liberal and Fascist boards, and you need to explain that the President sees three policy tiles, that the President can discard one, that the Chancellor can discard one more, that three rejected governments in a row puts a policy straight onto the table, and that after five Fascist policies the Chancellor gains a veto. None of it is difficult, but it is a paragraph of rules and a table of powers, and my experience is that a first time Secret Hitler group plays its first round badly and its second game well.

The play times follow from that. Avalon runs about 30 minutes. Secret Hitler runs about 30 to 45 minutes, and the difference is mostly the extra rounds that the policy track forces on you when the table plays cautiously.

Replay Value and the Theme Question

Both games replay well, and they replay for different reasons. Avalon replays because every game is a different argument about who was on which team, and because the optional characters change the balance each time. Secret Hitler replays because the policy deck runs out differently every round and because the powers create different problems each time.

The theme is the real divider for families, and it deserves a straight answer. Avalon is Arthurian fantasy. You are Loyal Servants of Arthur, you are Minions of Mordred, and the worst thing in the box is a man called the Assassin trying to kill Merlin. Secret Hitler is set in 1930s Germany, and the villains are fascists who elect a Hitler. The rules are not the problem. The subject matter is the reason many families skip it, and that is a reasonable line to draw for a table with a 10 year old in it.

For adults, the Secret Hitler theme is the point rather than the problem, and the history lesson is a real part of the appeal. It is also a social cost at a table where some people dislike the subject, so that is worth checking before you buy it. If the idea of a game about electing a Hitler makes half the table uncomfortable, buy Avalon and keep the evening light.

• Similarities: Hidden teams, a vote that matters, and one dramatic reveal at the end.
• Differences: Avalon ends with a single guess about Merlin, while Secret Hitler adds four presidential powers, a veto, and an execution that removes players.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: Avalon is the cleaner duel between two teams, and Secret Hitler is the bigger political machine.

Which Game Fits Your Table: Families Against Adults

For a family with kids aged 10 and up, buy Avalon. For a group of adults who want a sharper social game, buy Secret Hitler, with one caveat about the word sharper.

The family case is straightforward. Both games are rated 13 and up, so a 10 year old is below the recommended age for either one, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Avalon is still the one we would put in front of her, because the theme is gentle, the rules are short, nobody gets removed from the table, and a wrong assassination only embarrasses the person who guessed. If you want the safest possible family night with the same arguing energy, our best board games for teens and our tween picks that do not look babyish are the right shelf to browse instead.

The adult case splits on what sharper means to you. If sharper means cleaner deduction, with every result traceable to a human being and no luck anywhere in the box, then Avalon is the sharper game, and most experienced players in the comments on the BoardGameGeek thread make the same point. If sharper means more systems, more swings, and a table where a single round can go from a policy victory to an execution, then Secret Hitler is the sharper game, and its extra machinery is exactly what you are paying for. Our best board games for adults list is the wider shelf if you want to see where these two sit among the games adults actually buy.

If your group will not swallow the Weimar Germany theme, or if you need a game that plays with a 9 year old and a grandparent in the same session, then the choice is made for you. And if the honest answer is that you want the arguing without anyone lying to your face, our Codenames review is the cleaner night out, while Love Letter gives you the bluffing in a box that fits in a coat pocket. Guess Who works for younger players, and Just One keeps a family night cooperative. For the table sizes in play here, our 6 player guide and our 8 player guide cover the rest of the evening.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, The Resistance: Avalon or Secret Hitler?

The Resistance: Avalon is the better buy for most groups because nothing in it is random once the cards are dealt, every failed quest points at a person, and the game ends with one clean guess about who Merlin is. Secret Hitler is the pick for adults who want the politics, the policy deck, and bigger swings at the table.

Is Avalon harder to learn than Secret Hitler?

No. Avalon has a short rulebook and one loop of proposing a team, voting, and playing a quest card, so most groups are running it after a single mission. Secret Hitler adds a policy deck, four presidential powers, a veto, and an election tracker, so it needs a longer read and usually a second game before it feels smooth.

Do the fascists in Secret Hitler know each other?

Yes, and this is the big difference from Avalon. The fascists know each other and they know who Hitler is, and in games of 5 to 6 players Hitler also knows his one fellow fascist. In games of 7 to 10 players Hitler is not told who the other fascists are and has to work it out.

Does Avalon have player elimination?

No. Nobody is eliminated in Avalon, every player stays in every vote, and the game ends with a single assassination attempt at Merlin after three good quests. Secret Hitler can remove players with the Execution power, and an executed player leaves the table for the rest of the game.

Can kids aged 10 and up play Avalon or Secret Hitler?

Both games are rated 13 and up, so a 10 year old sits below the recommended age for either one. Avalon is still the one we would put in front of a 10 year old, because the Arthurian theme is gentle and the rules are shorter, while the Weimar Germany theme of Secret Hitler is the reason many families skip it.

How long does each game take to play?

Avalon runs about 30 minutes and Secret Hitler about 30 to 45 minutes, and a group learning either game for the first time should add another 10 to 15 minutes for setup and teaching. The rulebooks are short, but both games are better on the second play.

Can you play Avalon or Secret Hitler with fewer than 5 players?

No. Both games need 5 players minimum, and both are at their best with 7 or 8 people around the table. Below 5 the votes stop meaning much, and above 8 the table talk gets hard for anyone new to follow.

Spector’s Verdict on Avalon vs Secret Hitler

We have bought the games that sounded good and left the table after one round. These two both survived many rounds at our house, and the one we reach for more often is the one with no deck. Avalon does everything Secret Hitler does for us with fewer moving parts and a cleaner finish. If your group wants the politics, buy both and let the adults argue about it.