The only real problem here is likely to be stamping forms and completing the bureaucracy. I say it’s a problem because that’s part of the whole aesthetic of the experience and it’s a non-trivial loss if you can’t stamp a form ‘ROBOT’ even if you can substitute it with a verbal judgement. Literacy may be a slight issue, but the mechanisms of the game ensure that at least some of that is resolved right at the start of the interview. Only the robot instructions may be an difficulty when dealing with players that don’t speak the language of the game. 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. But still, if the other half of the game was amazing it could rescue the design. The problem is… it’s not. 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 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.

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. The problem is that this is hidden behaviour that allows for me to avoid penalties. The penalty is the only open information available to the investigator and if it’s so easy for me to avoid triggering it then realistically the difference between someone being a robot or a human is negligible. Literally the only way to force information into the conversation here is for the investigator to be aware of all the possible robot behaviours in a set of cards and to angle conversations around those possibilities. In other words, it requires a familiarity with the set of cards that either comes with advanced study or reinforced familiarity. And even then, it’s still straightforward for the robot player to dance around them. For example, the responses above would be my authentic, human responses to working in a clown college.

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. Inhuman Conditions is a new board game loosely based on the idea of the Turing test—a way to evaluate a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, devised by codebreaker and mathematician Alan Turing in 1950. But 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. 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.

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.

Surprisingly for a game like this, I’m going to recommend it in this category with the provisos above. Intersectional Accessibility In the game, one player is assigned the role of either robot or human. The other is an investigator attempting to figure out whether his or her opponent is a robot through conversation. The result is a surprisingly goofy romp in which humans pretend to be robots pretending to be humans. Finally... this is an opportunity for us to do some large-scale blind playtesting of the cards themselves. We know the framework of the game is solid, but we don't have as much data on the individual cards as we'd like. When you finish a round and someone else cycles in to play, it would be great if you could pull out your phone and give us some details about how your playtest went! 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.From the co-creators of Secret Hitler& Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players. Nonetheless, we’re going to recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Socioeconomic Accessibility We’ll tentatively recommend Inhuman Conditions in our fluid intelligence category, but we can’t recommend it for those with memory impairments. Physical Accessibility

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. Inhuman Conditions is a five-minute, two-player game of surreal interrogation and conversational judo, set in the heart of a chilling bureaucracy. 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. 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.https://www.dropbox.com/s/xeiyumex1gewcin/Inhuman%20Conditions%20PnP%20Investigator%20Forms%20%28Public%20File%29.pdf 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. 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.