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.

Inhuman Conditions is a five-minute, two-player game of surreal interrogation and conversational judo, set in the heart of a chilling bureaucracy. 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. 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. 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 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.

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The form is the final problematic component since it is very small and filling it out legibly is likely to be an issue.

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 idea seems to be ‘If you’re answering these honestly as a human you’ll find it easier to to deal with follow ups’, but I’m not sure it’s true in this context. It does though create a memory burden with unpredictable consequence. The extent to which inconsistency convinces someone you are a robot is decoupled from the mechanics and instead bound up in human psychology. 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. 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. 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. From the co-creators of Secret Hitler & Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players. 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. 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 Accessibility https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FiUATGD-M4W3YH4L-_QsxinZs_dBkQkmhgrSfEsAyNA/viewform?ts=5ba3f4cf&edit_requested=true Suspect: I’d replace the soul-dead harlequins that haunt my nightmares with dogs, so I was dean of a puppy college instead.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.

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. 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.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! 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. 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 ... There’s no assumption of gender in the rules or in the game, using instead the neutral terms ‘suspect’ and ‘investigator’. There’s no art in the game that is gendered either, with vaguely human bonces used instead on the cards.