Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

Product Information

Inhuman Conditions is a five-minute, two-player game of surreal interrogation and conversational judo, set in the heart of a chilling bureaucracy. From the co-creators of Secret Hitler& Better Myths: a Blade Runner-inspired, five-minute party game for two players. We’ll tentatively recommend Inhuman Conditions in our fluid intelligence category, but we can’t recommend it for those with memory impairments. Physical Accessibility This decision has not been made lightly. Despite our best efforts, we have reached a point where it is no longer viable to continue operations. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to all our users, partners, and supporters who have been with us on this journey. Your passion for board games and your continued engagement with our platform has made Board Game Atlas a special place for gamers around the world.

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. 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.This is a far more genuinely problematic category. Every part of the game is likely to be an issue here, although in varying levels of severity. Let’s begin with the less impactful stuff. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xeiyumex1gewcin/Inhuman%20Conditions%20PnP%20Investigator%20Forms%20%28Public%20File%29.pdf

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.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.

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.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. Suspect: I’d replace the soul-dead harlequins that haunt my nightmares with dogs, so I was dean of a puppy college instead. 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. 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.