Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

Product Information

This is an interesting social deduction game in that it doesn’t require bluffing so much as correctly following a set of instructions. For those without an inbuilt fluency in human behaviour, it’s likely the most accessible of this family of games we’ve ever looked at. Truthfully, it might be one of the reasons why I find the gameplay so unedifying – I’m very good at fitting this kind of instruction into how I talk because it’s basically how I navigate my daily life. Most of my social routines work like computer algorithms. When someone I don’t know particularly well says something to me, my mental response is something like ‘Ah, run function commiserate_person(STATE_HEARTFELT)’. That social API has been built up over a lifetime of saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and observing the results. A lot of how Inhuman Conditions works just requires me to run those brain subroutines with different parameters. 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 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.

We’ll strongly recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category, but it’s grudging. Visual Accessibility

What is Inhuman Conditions?

The final possibility is that you get dealt out a violent robot role, and that’s where it gets somewhat more interesting because that is a scenario in which you become proactive. You win in that circumstance by performing two of your three deprogramming activities and those are transgressive in a way that will garner attention if you don’t do it properly. ‘3 times, interrupt the investigator to add detail to a description’, or ‘continue to describe something, until interrupted’. When you pull off two of those, you then get to bring your own flavour of jump scare into the interview, indicating you killed everyone in the room. The only times I had fun when playing Inhuman Conditions was when I was a violent robot.

For one thing, both the investigator and the suspect in that scenario have the same goal, even if they don’t both know it at the time. Stamp the form ‘human’, that’s the win condition. Investigators, riddled through with suspicion as they are, need to be observing for micro-evidence that their interlocuter is a silicon CPU wrapped in a fallible flesh exoskeleton. When dealing with a robot, there are a number of these that may emerge. 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. Nonetheless, we’re going to recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Socioeconomic AccessibilityFor 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. When playing a patient robot, the instruction you are given is clearly shown in the centre of the card, and the font is of a reasonable size. This is an area where the need to pantomime inducer circuits might be useful because it’s where the maze would be on a human card. 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.

Anyway, my point from this is that the way the game is designed nullifies a lot of the criticism I’d normally have in this section of a teardown. It gives conversational prompts that lower the barrier to play, and you never need to directly deceive anyone – the deception comes as a natural result of obeying a directive. Even the jobs, which might require a bit of role-playing, are optional. There’s a mode in the game called ‘Sealed file’ where you don’t even have one.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. The stamps are fine, and they have prominent iconography on them. Colour isn’t used elsewhere in the game. From the co-creators of Secret Hitler& Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players. Much as with games such as Funemployed or Once Upon a Time, Inhuman Conditions put a lot of attention on each of the players. A common criticism I have had is it means if you don’t have anything to say it can be very uncomfortable. For the investigator in Inhuman Conditions that’s very true – they direct the speed and tone and direction of the conversation. The provision of communication prompts though helps reduce the cognitive overload of thinking of something to say or ask.