If you look up ‘accessibility’ in the dictionary, you’ll see something like: ‘the quality of being able to be entered or used by everyone, including people who have a disability’. Wikipedia places more emphasis on disability, but couples it with the notion of ‘universal design’, design for all regardless of age, disability, etc., so it’s worth keeping in mind all aspects of inclusivity, not just the ‘obvious’ ones.
Paying attention to inclusivity doesn’t help just a few people; it can affect many other individuals. For example, a not unexpected consequence of designing for vision impairment is that the end result benefits everyone—who can really complain about easier to read text (apart from designers of ornate typefaces)?
Unfortunately, it’s all too common that accessibility takes a back seat when board games are created. For example, one of my favourite games is Terraforming Mars, but the cards can be a bit cluttered: in some places, black text appears on a brown background; small abstract iconography is used in several different ways and places; and the resource game cubes are kinda fiddly.
However, there are some games where accessibility has been taken into account from the kick-off, and for others, after-market accessories and tools exist, which I’ll talk about later. And if all else fails, some homebrew hacking can help.
Where People Have Difficulties
The main issues I’ll deal with are vision and dexterity, though I’ll touch on hearing and cognition in the next article, along with a few other aspects of inclusivity. Please note that I’m no expert in this area, merely interested—and some of that interest is selfish! Even the most healthy and fit of us is only a few decades or a serious accident away from some form of impairment (hopefully only temporary in the latter case).
Games, like most products, tend to be designed for the ‘ideal’ human being, but in the real world, our capabilities vary. Visual acuity ranges from better than 20/20 (which is what’s defined as ‘normal’) all the way to zero, with many detours along the way, such as colour blindness or limited field of vision, and then there are conditions like dyslexia (not strictly vision, but related). In addition, as we get older, sight can deteriorate—I say this as someone who now needs both distance glasses and a pair for reading, and neither is particularly well attuned to board gaming. A 2021 report by the RNIB states that two million people in the UK suffer from sight loss, and one in five of us will experience some loss of vision during our lifetimes.
Differences in mobility, dexterity, and strength affect people’s ability to interact with games, too: for example, a million of us have some form of tremor.
A fair amount of work has been done within computing circles to make digital games and applications more accessible—a lot of this is undoubtedly altruism at work, but the cynical among us might ascribe some actions to companies wanting to exploit a small but significant market! There’s not been so much accessibility work in the world of board gaming, but perhaps the promise of increased profits will encourage more adoption of similar techniques.
Vision
This first article will focus on sight, and the second will cover other accessibility and inclusivity issues.
To help people with more extreme vision problems, The RNIB operates one of a small number of stores offering several classic games with larger print, tactile pieces, braille printed cards and the like. They also sell various textured ‘dots’ that can be stuck to playing pieces to allow them to be distinguished by touch and Velcro pads to prevent pieces from being knocked over.
An ingenious bit of technology you can find in the RNIB store is the PENfriend; this couples a voice recorder with finely patterned stickers that can be used on almost anything—tapping the pen on the sticker will replay the recorded message. Someone I’ve spoken with describes it as a ‘life-changing device,’ which he can also use with board games: he told me how he employs it with the popular game Wingspan, by recording information for each card, keyed via small stickers on the cards, giving him the ability to play the game. This may sound like a trivial use of such technology, but if you’re here, you already know how much pleasure playing board and card games brings to people.
Less extreme, a redesign of game components with simpler imagery can be sufficient for some people: Stonemaier Games produces sets of decluttered, larger text cards for Wingspan. However, it’s not all been plain sailing; although demand for the cards was vocal, sales haven’t matched that initial promise, as Jamey Stegmaier explained in a 2023 blog post. Brian Chandler has penned an article on the development of these cards and his other work with Stonemaier—it’s interesting how the cards for Wyrmspan were designed with accessibility given a higher priority to reduce the need for a separate vision friendly deck. (Brian’s site contains much more information relating to colour blindness and board gaming, well worth a visit if you’re interested in the topic.)
Stonemaier Games, like many other publishers, also offers deluxe versions of game tokens, which have different shapes instead of all being circular—this can also help people to distinguish between the different types of food in Wingspan, etc. by touch. There’s a business trade-off here, in that if the game existed only with these deluxe tokens, it’d be more expensive, thus putting off potential purchasers; as with the vision friendly cards, it makes more financial sense for Stonemaier to ship the basic version, and make only people who want or need the alternatives pay the extra. (No matter what any of us might like, the world of disability is seldom fair, and someone ends up paying the ‘accessibility tax.’)
As another example, 17 years after publishing the original game of Qwirkle, Mindware released a colour blind friendly variant—the changes are more contrast in the colours (which helps everyone, not just the colour blind) and easily distinguished shapes in the middle of each tile to represent the colours—the coupling of colours with some other modality is known as dual coding. Gigamic seems to have taken a similar approach to Quarto, creating a Quarto Access version for visually impaired folk (replacing the white/black colour distinction with groove/no groove on playing pieces), but unlike Mindware, they’ve merged both versions into a single product instead of continuing to offer both.
As an aside, in an attempt to standardise dual coding mappings, ColorADD is promoting a ‘colour alphabet’ in which primary colours are associated with specific symbols, and the symbols combine logically for more complex colours. Unfortunately few games employ this, either because the designers are unaware of it or because licensing is expensive, but one example is Sea Salt & Paper. ColorADD also offers a phone app which translates colours into symbols and text, which could be of use in other games.
I’m not arguing that every game has to be totally accessible—we’d lose the intricate beauty of games like Arc Nova or Everdell, and there’s pretty much nothing that can be done to make Hues and Cues playable by people with colour difficulties—but my point is that while some games will be difficult to make accessible, others need only a small tweak: better colour choices, dual coding, clearer typefaces…
Now, it’s easy to say—well, relatively easy—that game designers should do better, but that’s about future games; it’s too late for the ones we currently have. Where game publishers haven’t taken the steps Stonemaier or Mindware have, third party game enhancements might help; for example, 64oz Games sells a range of ‘accessibility kits,’ which can include custom components or QR codes that can be translated into speech via phone apps (a clunkier, but much cheaper, alternative to PENfriend).
And if that still doesn’t provide a solution, fans have often stepped in. Web searches can sometimes locate extra-large playmats or high contrast materials; as one example, Alchemists is not a vision-friendly game, but some fans on BoardGameGeek have created a few components with better legibility (e.g., by replacing background textures with plain colours). There’s always DIY too: put your own labels or stickers on playing cards, for example, or glue sand to pieces of one colour to give them a distinct texture.
Phone and tablet apps can help, whether that’s a complete digital version of a game (where you can typically zoom in and which include audible signals when events occur; some offer a high contrast or ‘colour blind mode’ too), and there are general-purpose utilities like magnifiers and text to speech apps.
A slight digression: having brought up text to speech apps, game manuals can be a source of frustration. The pretty diagrams which help sighted people so much are of next to no value to folk who can’t see them clearly, and the layout choices leading to interspersing those pictures with blocks of text make using a screen-reader an act of torture. Ideally rule books would repeat the information in diagrams within their text (similar to the way, say, Terraforming Mars cards show their actions via graphics and text), or have a text-heavy appendix. Fortunately, you can find many user-created textual game guides on BoardGameGeek and there are plenty of tutorial videos and game walkthroughs on YouTube.
I should also mention games like Master Fox and Nyctophobia, based mainly around touch—sighted players are blindfolded and have to identify or follow shapes by touch alone, levelling the field in a different way.
One final note on the subject of sight, even if you have 20/20 vision, how often have you struggled to read small text all the way across a game table? You might ask someone else to read it out—and that’s a reminder that not every problem needs a technical solution; other players can help with reading, distinguishing colours, etc.
That wraps up this first article, and in part 2, I’ll talk about dexterity and inclusivity problems.
