Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

Product Information

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.

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. So, those are the problems. There are though solutions to (almost) all of those. The issue is that every solution you have removes another of the layers of gameplay layered on top of the main bulk of the experience. At its core it is a structured interview which is an accessible proposition. All the gameplay systems serve to abstract away from that. At a certain point you need to ask yourself if you need the game at all.

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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’.

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Board Game Atlas, effective 8/23/23. Since our inception, we have been proud to serve the board game community by providing comprehensive information on board games, pricing details, and connecting enthusiasts with fantastic gaming experiences. 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. Inhuman Conditions is licensed under Creative Commons BY—NC—SA 4.0. That means that if you make your own version of our game, you have to give us credit for the original, you're not allowed to profit from it commercially in any way, and you have to license it under the exact same CC license. You also can't submit anything to an app store or anything like that. https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpgwwcagqfwxo8r/Inhuman%20Conditions%20Print%20%26%20Play%20%28Public%20File%29.pdf 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.

What is Inhuman Conditions?

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... Remember what our programming was – do not mention anyone except strangers and enemies. I’ve cast the terrifying prospect of working with clowns in a profoundly antagonistic way. If asked any specifics about anyone in the college it’s trivial for them to be enemies. Or being Dean I could simply say that I don’t have a lot of face to face experience with those in the college so I don’t know them. Avoiding carrying out my penalty, in other words, requires virtually no skill or setup. Constraints, if they are to inspire creativity, must be genuinely constraining. These aren’t handcuffs, they’re more like bracelets. They ornament a role without tethering it anywhere awkward. Inhuman Conditions is a five-minute, two-player game of surreal interrogation and conversational judo, set in the heart of a chilling bureaucracy.