For immediate release. To the excitement of board gamers and academics all over the world, the array of playable characters in Secret Sartre—the social deduction game of academic intrigue and ideological infighting—has been extended with the 2023 president of Harvard University Dr. Claudine Gay and economics professor Gad Saad from Concordia University.

“When we released Secret Sartre in 2015, what we then saw as the intellectual and moral corruption of Western Academia was still a contentious issue. By 2023, this position has entered the mainstream Overton window of acceptable discourse,” says Thore Husfeldt, who considers himself the designer of Secret Sartre “at least in the postmodern sense”.

Sartre is a reskinning of the incredibly well-made and highly playable Secret Hitler (Temkin et al., 2016), moving the original’s setting and theme from the 1930’s German Reichstag to faculty politics at a modern university. In Hitler, the ideological fault line is between liberals and fascists, in Sartre, it is between the Enlightenment and Postmodernism.

“It is immensely gratifying that a small decade after both games were released, the themes have come full circle,” opines Husfeldt, ”and a wider public now realises that the progressive ideology—call it postmodernism, collectivism, DEI, woke, critical social justice, neo-marxism—is not only illiberal, but openly antisemitic. By now, you could play Secret Sartre with the allegiance cards of the original just as well!”

To commemorate the developments in the 4th quarter of 2023, the rosters of both factions are extended by two of the most respected intellectuals of either side: Team Postmodernism is bolstered by Dr. Claudine Gay, the 2023 President of Harvard University, to represent the moral authority and intellectual and academic standards of one of our most trusted institutions. To balance this, the brave members of Team Enlightenment now have access to the Gadfather Himself, author of the The Parasitic Mind.

Earlier Expansions

This is the third character expansion to Secret Sarte, known among gamers as the “Harvard expansion”.

1. Original 2015 release of Secret Sartre: Postmodernism: Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Sartre. Enlightenment: Dennet, Curie, Darwin, Russel, Chomsky, Dawkins.
2. 2017 Evergreen State College expansion: Enlightenment: JB Peterson, B Weinstein.
3. 2020 Critical Theory expansion: Postmodernism: Marcuse, Horkheimer. Enlightenment: Pluckrose, Lindsay.

References

The art o the Saad card is based on a photo by Gage Skidmore, released at Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY 2.0. The art on the Gay card is just something I found somewhere and use without attribution.