Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

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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. The penalty is always clearly visible in front of the players, and the robot player (if there is one) will have all of the gameplay information they need easily available – no need to rely on memory there. A degree of spatial intelligence is needed though to interpret mazes for human player. Suspect: I’d replace the soul-dead harlequins that haunt my nightmares with dogs, so I was dean of a puppy college instead. The physical requirements are light, but they can’t be sacrificed without consequence. We’ll still recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Emotional Accessibility Each game has one Investigator and one Suspect. Armed only with two stamps and a topic of conversation, the Investigator must figure out whether the Suspect is a Human or a Robot.

There are only eleven modules – it’s not inconceivable that there are eleven colours that can be clearly distinguished. And yet we have light blue, cyan, and dark blue along with ‘dark green’ and ‘light green’ and various other annoying combinations. It’s only ever an issue in certain circumstances (such as tidying up the game after a session where certain combinations are used) but it merits discussion. Meeple Like Us is engaged in mapping out the accessibility landscape of tabletop games. Teardowns like this are data points. Games are not necessarily bad if they are scored poorly in any given section. They are not necessarily good if they score highly. The rating of a game in terms of its accessibility is not an indication as to its quality as a recreational product. These teardowns though however allow those with physical, cognitive and visual accessibility impairments to make an informed decision as to their ability to play. 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.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.

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 ...

What is Inhuman Conditions?

You could ignore this part of the game, but it does mean that one of the few unshakeable points of data an investigator can use is lost.

But still, if the other half of the game was amazing it could rescue the design. The problem is… it’s not. For an investigator, the problems come in with the inducer answer key (in very small letters that can be somewhat lost in the icon on the card) and in the conversation cards themselves since they come in ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ flavours and they need to be interrelated. 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.Inhuman Conditions is not so much inaccessible here as it is infuriating. There aren’t any problems as such – colour is never used as the sole channel of information – but the colour palette really bothered me. It’s used primarily to separate out the different conversational modules and there is so little variation between some of them that I couldn’t make out the differences on occasion. From the co-creators of Secret Hitler& Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players. 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.