Anyone who has listened to our podcast (The Geek Allstars) will know that one of our ranks, Todd (Gyroplay), is a colorblind gamer. Generally this has been only a minor inconvenience to him in the game and also garners the usual good natured ribbing by the rest of us. However, it wasn’t until our latest recording that we noticed it can really RUIN a completely good game for people who want to love the game.

First a little back ground on color blindness. It sounds simple enough, blind to color right? Nope. In fact there are a few different types of color blindness. There is a wonderful web site that covers this EXTREMELY well (and is mainly about making presentations for colorblind), but I will quote only one excerpt here for the definition for color blindness.

The human eye has three types of cone cells. These cells express different types of opsin genes, which are sensitive mainly to red, green and blue, respectively. Colorblindness is the situation where the function of one of these opsins are lost, or perturbed.

This picture also gives you a pretty good idea of what normal colors look like to people with the different types of colorblindness.

Now for most of us board game junkies, this is something that we might never think about in our normal course of gaming. Whether it be the other percent of the population is not in our game group, or those people possibly never got into gaming b/c of these difficulties, either way it doesn’t come up as often in many of our gaming lives.  Turning two of my best friends into hard core gamers in the last year has been an amazing experience, and one in which the whole idea of gaming with the color blind has only recently become a big topic. Most of the games I have exposed them to early, have been “gateway” types of quick games (Pikomino,Carcassonne, Coloretto), deck builders (Ascension,Dominion), and Euro-style games (Ticket To Ride, Stone Age). Some of those I mention use color quite a bit and the majority of others use color but augment this with heavy use of symbols (TTR,Ascension), or different shaped chits (Stone Age). As I mentioned above usually it’s only a mild inconvenience to play games but last night we played two new games to the group which nearly caused Todd to want to quit gaming for a while (or at least a few hours lol).

First up was Macao by Stefan Feld. As a group we absolutely LOVE this game for the mechanisms and the depth, however it has two GLARING flaws. First the rule book is TERRIBLE, poorly written, and some of the abbreviations on the cards should have been different for ease of play. I will blame this more on translation, and a general laziness in publishing (I am not sure if Rio Grandeis 100% to blame for this but for now in my eyes you are). But I will keep that whole argument for another day and time and not here.

Not the easiest of pieces for CB people

Yet, what I will complain about here is the colors. This is mostly due to the way the cards are printed. See the wooden cubes can be separated in piles and they could be distinguished apart from each other by a color blind individual easy enough, but the colors on the card are terrible. It’s quite likely that it’s just b/c they were trying to go for the whole “old world” feel to the game, but the biggest problem is the colors on the card don’t even remotely look like the colors of the cubes in some ways (namely the reds and purples). This unfortunately garnered the quote from Todd “it’s a great game but I will never play it again”.

On to the second new game of the night, Race for the Galaxy. Our group is fairly deck-building and anything card and dice loving, so RFTG was a natural fit. (It’s still fairly new to me so please excuse any miss-use of Race game terms in this part) Coincidentally enough while over at Eric Martin’s house on Sat, I was able to play this for the first time twice, and I loved it from first deal. Knowing what type of gamers we are I knew race would be a easy fit. After watching a couple of video’s Todd was in love and instantly went out, bought, and sleeved the base game in preparation for our game night during the Super Bowl. The first play went pretty smooth. Even being new to the game their first game went pretty well with the usual slow downs for icons, but all in all success. The second game, not so much. The ease of the 1st game was primarily due to Todd going for a military strategy and it just so happened no wind-fall or color related things came up at all in front of him in the whole first game. However, he decided he wanted to go a different route in the second game only to be stymied by the cards. The biggest culprit to the problem was both the size of the icons on the bottom of some cards and also the size and amount of color on some wind-fall worlds. He was starting off with a world which gives him a discount to take over brown worlds, and this was instantly a problem b/c in his hand he had what looked to him like 3 brown worlds only to realize two of them were actually yellow. To complicated this even further, he got a card with a power which had the exception that it could NOT be used on yellow regular or wind-fall worlds. Since a few of these colors look the same this lead to him both trying to get discounts on a card which did not match up and later trying to use his produce power on yellow cards which he could not do. Now let me stress, we are all real good friends and I don’t care how many times he asks me, I have no problem at all telling him what color something is, but if you put yourself in his shoes, this is frustrating on a few levels. Not only does he have to feel that he is an idiot asking 100 times (his words), but he also on some level is revealing his strategy to us (again, not a big deal but at heart all of us heavier gamers want to win and not have our plans revealed). So this second game left a REAL sour taste in Todd’s mouth as he LOVED the mechanics of the game but the color thing made him want to bash his head against a wall.

Which now, after a couple of wordy stories brings me to my main point, what can publishers do to adapt to the color blind? Well first let’s look at some examples of games which do it RIGHT. I won’t complain about the ones who do it wrong b/c I gave Macao and Race as 2 examples of games which would benefit from a re-thinking of how they can fix their color blind unfriendliness. A QUICK ASIDE—> For anyone who is colorblind or curious about some games and implications of color blind playing, please check out this REAL GOOD Geek-List from boardgamegeek.com from user Ozludo —“Colourblindness and Games (that’s color-blindness for our US friends)”

Use Symbols — A perfect example of this is Ticket to Ride. It might not be readily apparent to the average person on first glance, but each different

Ticket to Ride uses both Symbols and Different pictures

TTR train card is not only a different color, but it also has a different symbol on the card. It might take an initial explanation to a color blind person for using the board and matching those colors to the cards, but this is a perfect example of how the game can make one simple subtle change and yet cater to the CB demographic. (I know each train type is completely different on the card as well which helps, but work with me here)

Use Backgrounds– A perfect example of this type is Coloretto. Sure the WHOLE game is about colors, but for us color unchallenged, have you ever noticed that each color has a different background to it? This one simple detail makes a game which would suck to play as someone who has color issues, to the fun quick joy that the game really is.

Shapes and sizes– I already mentioned how Stone Age uses different shapes for their goods along with the different colors, which makes things easy as pie to tell them apart. The second example I want to throw out is the game Fresco. Fresco, is another game completely based on color and painting, but it’s use of size of it’s cubes makes it easier to play. The basic colors are all one smaller size, the second set of colors is a second size and the most advanced colors (brown and pink in game) are a completely different size. Not only is this an easier thing to see once explained, but also the tiles you are to claim keep the colors in the same place on each card. If you were going to look at a card with a color cost all you have to know is which color is on which side of the tile and you can extrapolate what colors are needed. When we played this only at the beginning of the game did Todd have to say “so what color is this”.

Coloretto uses different backgrounds

Once explained initially he got it and he was good to go. This made what could have been a disaster of a game session, into a game he thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn’t mind playing again.

Fresco Tiles and Cubes Note the locations on the tiles and Size of the cubes.

So I ask this of you game developers, take notice of people with color blindness. Make them a part of your play testing. Try and use things like SYMBOLS and varying sizes. Also don’t try and get too stylistic as it can cause you to totally miss out on the fact that it’s ruining the game for a section of the population. We, as gamers should not have to deface our games just to make something color blind friendly, it should come in the box that way.

I hope you will look at games a little differently now and I hope designers and publishers think of these things, b/c I would really like to play Macao or RFTG again with my group!

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