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. https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpgwwcagqfwxo8r/Inhuman%20Conditions%20Print%20%26%20Play%20%28Public%20File%29.pdf 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. 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. 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.

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.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. 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. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xeiyumex1gewcin/Inhuman%20Conditions%20PnP%20Investigator%20Forms%20%28Public%20File%29.pdf

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. 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. Nonetheless, we’re going to recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Socioeconomic Accessibility

But still, if the other half of the game was amazing it could rescue the design. The problem is… it’s not.

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.

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. The form is the final problematic component since it is very small and filling it out legibly is likely to be an issue. The physical requirements are light, but they can’t be sacrificed without consequence. We’ll still recommend Inhuman Conditions in this category. Emotional Accessibility 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 ...

Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people.” https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FiUATGD-M4W3YH4L-_QsxinZs_dBkQkmhgrSfEsAyNA/viewform?ts=5ba3f4cf&edit_requested=trueThe 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. 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. 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.