Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

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Suspect: Delighted. Living in a horror house full of pale-faced manikins is exactly how I wanted to live the only life I get on this planet. Robots must answer the Investigator's questions without arousing suspicion, but are hampered by some specific malfunction in their ability to converse. They must be clever, guiding the conversation in subtle ways without getting caught. Really it’s the programmed behaviour where the largest bulk of deception is located, and if you don’t have programmed behaviour there will never, absent player error, be a reason for a discernible pattern to emerge. And, if there’s no risk of breaking your programming, there’s no requirement for the penalty on the table to be enacted. Literally the human v human scenario is ‘Have a conversation in which you don’t do anything weird’. The only small intersectional issue I might point out is that a fluid intelligence impairment that intersects with an emotional inaccessibility may exacerbate issues that I outlined in those sections. Particularly being labelled as a robot when you’re a human. Other than that, I don’t see an intersectional issue that would change the individual or compound grades. In other words, the game just doesn’t work in the mathematical majority of the configurations you’ll encounter it . Even taking into account the optional advanced rules, there’s nothing there that genuinely alters the experience in a direction that compensates for its structural instability.

Anyway, you’re not here for inked stamp based erotica. Probably. What you’re here for is our other kind of erotica – stripping a game naked and pointing out its many flaws. So let’s get started. Colour Blindness Nonetheless, we’re going to recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Socioeconomic Accessibility Humans may speak freely, but may find this freedom as much curse as gift. There are no right or wrong answers, only suspicious and innocuous ones, and one slip of the tongue could land Humans and Robots alike in the Bureau's Invasive Confirmation Unit. There, alongside Investigators who make improper determinations, they will await further testing ... First of all, the game is heavily card based, and those cards are almost entirely visual. Roles and penalties are dealt out at the start of an interview, and while they aren’t complicated or dense there’s a problem with a suspect inquiring what they are. Not so much the role, which is there mostly for flavour, but the penalty. If a suspect asks ‘Uh, what was the penalty again’ during an interview what they have actually said is ‘Hello, I am a robot’. Human players never need to know the penalty except during the initial calibration exercises. Let’s go for the first, most obvious reason. When the suspect takes on a role, it’s one of three possibilities – human, patient robot, and violent robot. Most of the cards are human, and the challenge there is to not appear like a robot. Half the time, when playing, you’re a human pretending to be a human so that another human will stamp that you’re human on their form.

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This is a far more genuinely problematic category. Every part of the game is likely to be an issue here, although in varying levels of severity. Let’s begin with the less impactful stuff. Right from the start, in half or so if your game sessions, the fun comes entirely from how much you enjoy talking to someone. For someone like me, who hates talking to anyone, it’s already a failure of a game. Suspect: I’d replace the soul-dead harlequins that haunt my nightmares with dogs, so I was dean of a puppy college instead. The largest problem here comes for those with memory impairments, because within the interview it’s important (to avoid suspicion) that you are coherent and consistent with your answers. Human and robot players need to ensure that they don’t trigger penalties when they shouldn’t. Robot players also need to remember their programming and how that relates to what they’ve just said so as to correctly trigger penalties. But more than this, the interview answers should have intellectual consistency.

Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people.” Once again, thank you for being a part of Board Game Atlas. We will always cherish the memories, connections, and excitement for board gaming that this community has fostered. The third thing I love here is the ambition of the game. One of the things I adore about Jaipur is how it manages to make a satisfying trading game for only two players. If you’d told me that was the game you were designing I probably would have said it couldn’t be done. Inhuman Conditions is attempting to create a compelling two player social deduction game and I honestly consider that to be impossible. You might be able to design a game that covers that territory but I don’t think there’s enough ‘social’ in a duo for it to work. Still, if you’re going to try that you’re going to get my attention. A heroic failure always stirs me more than a cowardly success. Surprisingly for a game like this, I’m going to recommend it in this category with the provisos above. Intersectional AccessibilityBut that’s a smaller issue compared to the inducer cards, which have different kinds of accessibility problem depending on whether they are human or robot. Conversational games like this are often a problem when it comes to cognitive faculties. They tend to be deceptively simple in their mechanisms because the real cognitive workload is what you say rather than what you can say and when. Inhuman Conditions does some interesting things with this. The form is the final problematic component since it is very small and filling it out legibly is likely to be an issue. The problem though is that Inhuman Conditions just doesn’t work. And the bigger problem is that it doesn’t work on several levels, any one of which is enough to irreparably break the experience. From the co-creators of Secret Hitler& Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players.