Mr. Boxleiter, Mr. Temkin and a third creator, Tommy Maranges, had been obsessing over the intricacies of deception games. When Mr. Boxleiter returned to their shared office on Monday after having watched 705 minutes of Americans battling Germans, he had an idea for a new game, based on Hitler’s rise to power. The group had a playable prototype of Secret Hitler 48 hours later.

“It was a month before even Hillary announced,” Mr. Maranges, 27, said. “It truly was like, what if we made a game about the past, and not about any other time in history.”

They set up a Kickstarter campaign on Nov. 23, 2015, with a goal of raising $54,450 to print its first run of the game, with art by Mackenzie Schubert. In 24 hours, it had raised more than twice that amount. By the time the game began shipping, in August 2016, it had attracted more than 30,000 backers, making it one of the five most widely supported tabletop games in Kickstarter’s history. (The game is not yet available overseas, but it does not include any Nazi symbols or images of Hitler, making it more likely to be accepted in countries like Germany.)

Though it is easier for edgy games to find support at Kickstarter, even people at the crowdfunding site were unpersuaded by the name at first.

“I advised them not to call it that,” said Luke Crane, Kickstarter’s head of games. “I said don’t call it that. My exact words were perhaps a bit more colorful.”

He said that even with the success of the game, he still knew some people who would not play it because of its name. But he added that it was clear that the game’s creators had tapped into a topic of discussion in a way that was difficult to achieve, even among the subset that reach to do so.