276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

£30£60.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.” The stamps are fine, and they have prominent iconography on them. Colour isn’t used elsewhere in the game.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. 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.

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. 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.

Also, sign up for our newsletter!

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. 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.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment