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. 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.

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

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

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.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...

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.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.