The board game was designed by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter and Tommy Maranges, with artwork created by Mackenzie Schubert, and first released on August 25, 2016.

To win the game, both parties are set to competitively enact liberal and fascist policies respectively, or complete a secondary objective directly tied to the Hitler role.

After each successful election, the President blindly takes three policy cards from the draw pile, each of which could be "liberal" or "fascist".

While enacting a liberal policy will have no direct effect on the game, passing a fascist policy may grant the President special executive actions referred to as "Presidential Powers", including the ability to privately check the three top cards of the draw pile; investigate a player's party membership; choose the next round's President via special election; or execute a player, removing that player from the game.

Secret Hitler was designed by Max Temkin (the co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and Humans vs. Zombies), Mike Boxleiter (co-founder of Mikengreg, the video game developer behind Solipskier and TouchTone) and Tommy Maranges (the writer of Philosophy Bro), and was illustrated by Mackenzie Schubert (illustrator of games such as Letter Tycoon and Penny Press), collectively known as Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage LLC.

[3] The original concept was developed by Boxleiter and Maranges as means to re-engineer the gameplay of Avalon, with Temkin adding significant influence from Werewolf variations.

[6] Meanwhile, a freeware print-and-play edition of Secret Hitler was released on November 25, 2015, under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license.

[7] Secret Hitler first shipped for Kickstarter backers, in multiple waves starting on August 25, 2016, and was released to retail shortly after.

[citation needed] In February 2017, free copies of Secret Hitler were shipped to all 100 members of the United States Senate.