Colorblind Games

Life on the farm.

We received a complementary prototype copy of Agropolis from Buttonshy Games for this preview. Some game elements may change in the final version. Final color correction is not complete, so all comments related to color refer exclusively to the pre-published prototype.

During the day I work as a traffic engineer and transportation planner in Seattle. In my spare time I play tabletop games. Sprawlopolis is a clever combination of my day job and my hobby, asking players to build a new city from the ground up.

I am terrible at Sprawlopolis. And I can’t stop playing it.

Agropolis ruralizes the Sprawlopolis theme, sticks close to the tile-laying puzzle formula, and adds new tweaks and features. I grew up in a small town in Missouri, surrounded by farm culture, so I had high hopes I could leverage my roots for success this time around.

I am equally terrible at Agropolis. I can’t stop playing it.

Buttonshy Games have spent the past few years perfecting 18-card wallet games. From Avignon to Antimony, Turbo Drift to Tussie Mussie, their games offer big fun in a small package. I keep a Buttonshy game in my backpack at all times, ready for a lunch break, airport layover, or other unexpected moment to play.

With such severe design constraints, ensuring accessibility can be challenging. Jason Tagmire shared the company’s efforts to include colorblind players during design and development of all their games. “With 18 cards, everything can be tighter than normal, and color palettes often lean towards thematic over mechanic, but we always have it in mind.”

Sprawlopolis and Agropolis use color to distinguish the zone types. Sprawlopolis introduced the first four zones and their colors: orange Residential, green Parks, blue Commercial, and grey Industrial. Agropolis keeps the same pattern, introducing four new zones (with four associated new colors) to the mix: yellow, red, brown, and purple representing Cornfields, Orchards, Livestock, and Vineyards.

Since color is vital to solving the series’ puzzles, art design is equally important for colorblind gamers to even attempt this game. I struggle to distinguish the eight different colors, so I rely on other clues added to the cards so color is not the only distinguisher: “We usually try to double code as much as possible, and in Agropolois everything is double coded.”

These design choices and Danny Devine‘s artwork provide me the additional information I need to navigate some of the trickiest combinations:

• Sprawlopolis Parks (green) and Agropolis Livestock (brown) blocks never have a road running through them, which helps distinguish them from Residential (orange) and Orchards (red), among others.
• All Parks (green) have trees, but no animals. All Livestock (brown) have animals, but no trees.
• Every Cornfield (yellow) has a silo. Industrial (grey) blocks include smoke stacks.
• Residential (orange) buildings are squares and rectangles. Commercial (blue) ones are multi-polygonal.
• Orchards (red) include orthogonally-placed trees. Vineyards show vines planted diagonally.

Jason described it this way: “There are visual non-color elements in each type of block, just like Sprawlopolis. It’s not as fast as the color identification but it’s there.”

This has been my experience. When I play Sprawlopolis or Agropolis with others, I’m the slow player at the table. This might be simple analysis paralysis, but it may also include my brain needing a little extra time to process the current board state. That said, I’m truly enjoying Agropolis and highly recommend it – especially if you already enjoy Sprawlopolis.

Agropolis launches on Kickstarter September 29. The Kickstarter offer of this stand-alone game will include a free combo pack – 6 cards to add if you have both Sprawlopolis and Agropolis for a combo experience.

Agropolis is designed by Steven Aramini and Danny Devine with artwork by Danny Devine. The Combo Pack is designed by Steven Aramini, Danny Devine, and Jason Tagmire with artwork by Danny Devine. Agropolis is published by Buttonshy Games.

Image Credits (top to bottom): Jason Tagmire; Brian Chandler (slider via Pilestone); Brian Chandler.

Eternal Blue. Forever Green.

In Cascadia, players place habitat tiles and wildlife tokens to create their own corner of the Pacific Northwest. Each ecosystem is scored based on each animal’s spatial preferences and the size of contiguous habitats. Cascadia is a quick-to-learn, quick-to-play tile layer that elicits the question, “One more game”?

Board games with natural themes rely on the colors of nature – warm browns, reds, and yellows; cool greens and blues. These real-world hues can be challenging for colorblind gamers, so designers and publishers must take care when bringing the great outdoors to the table.

Cascadia continues a lineage of nature-themed games that handle colorblind accessibility well, and designer Randy Flynn described how he considered this balance during design and development:

“For Cascadia, we wanted the player’s final environment to look like a beautiful section of land. [Beth Sobel‘s] artwork really shines, and we wanted players to see it and imagine an actual landscape. We also wanted to ensure the game was accessible to as many people as possible.”

Cascadia will likely be compared with Flatout Games‘ 2019 hit, Calico. Each is a pick-one-place-one tile layer, and both games elegantly balance art, graphic design, and accessibility. “Like Calico, we were really focused on trying to have an accessible experience while also creating a harmonious color palette,” Shawn Stankewich shared.

While Calico relied on double-coding to help players distinguish colors, Randy described a different approach to balancing Cascadia’s art design with accessibility.

“We didn’t want to use the same solution that Calico used, where it put the button icons on every tile. We felt that would distract from the gorgeous landscape. Instead, we worked with Beth to make sure the patterns for the habitat tile art were unique enough on their own that the different habitats were distinct.”

As the team iterated, Shawn described one more tweak to the tiles. “At one point the wetlands and prairies were too close in texture [for colorblind gamers], so we modified so they would be more easily distinguishable.”

Randy also addressed his approach to the wildlife tokens. “We had a lot of color combinations we needed to work well together. In this case we largely rely on the unique wildlife icons to stand out and be unique.”

The end result is a fantastic game where color supports immersion but is not required for gameplay. You could play Cascadia in black-and-white, which reflects the team’s commitment to colorblind accessibility. But you wouldn’t want to, which is a testament to its beauty. I’ve had a great time playing so far, and I highly recommend getting your hands on Cascadia!

Cascadia launches on Kickstarter September 15.

You can follow Randy Flynn on Twitter at rf_seattle. Reach out to Flatout Games on Twitter, Instagram, or their website.

Note: Colorblind Games received a complementary review copy of Cascadia for this preview. The components and final art may change in the final published version.

Images provided by Flatout Games and Randy Flynn

“I am your density.” -George McFly

Summer 1987: Most of my paper route earnings disappeared 33 cents at a time for packs of Topps baseball cards, which was my entry into the dopamine hit of card packs. Would I score a Mark McGwire? Bo Jackson?

Or another Pat Tabler.

Winter 2001: Now all grown up, most of my engineering earnings disappeared 3 dollars at a time for Decipher’s Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game. I revisited the joy of childhood, this time hoping for Aragorn’s Bow or The Witch King.  Nearly 20 years later we’re still building Hobbit Healers and Moria Swarms at our house.

Spring 2020: Nearly two decades after LOTR, I bought a few deeply-discounted booster boxes to put together a casual play Star Wars: Destiny decks. Instead of crunchy chewing gum, each pack of Destiny includes a chunky die!

Colors

The primary colors in Star Wars: Destiny are literally the primary colors – red, blue, and yellow (with grey thrown in). This eases the burden for most colorblind players. I found the cards and dice colors easy to distinguish from one another. In addition, each is also double-coded with the color name typed at the bottom. The dice are not double-coded, but their image matches all or part of the card’s image.

Note for low-vision gamers: Along with my color vision deficiency, I’m also experiencing something doctors call “getting old,” which has reduced my ability to read very small text. Most text and icons in this game are fantastic – font size is fine, contrast is good, and the iconography is top notch. But the bottom-level text, including the double-coded color information, is in tiny uppercase font – I find it barely readable.

To build a Star Wars: Destiny deck, players first choose heroes (typically 2 or 3), and then only use cards that match one of those heroes’ colors. So someone with a severe color vision deficiency may need help, but again, the color is typed at the bottom of each card.

Identifying colors is not as vital during gameplay, though some require spotting a color or card/hero/die or acting on a single color of dice or other cards in play.

The only real color problem I encountered, which hasn’t caused any issues during normal play, is that collector-level colors are more subtle, as illustrated and described here:

The gray, blue, and purple can be easily mixed up by those with color vision deficiency, especially given their small size in the bottom corner of each card. However, Legendary (Purple) cards always come with a die and Common (Blue) cards never do, so once I learned more about the distribution of card rarity I found this easy to work around.

The Verdict

At the end of the day, Star Wars: Destiny is quite playable for colorblind gamers. Its bright palette of red, blue, and yellow make cards easy to distinguish, and double-coding can help those who continue to have issues. I experienced some challenge during booster pack opening, due to the colors used for rarity and the very small font and icons denoting each card’s number and set.

If you’re interested at all, I’ve found this to be a great time to jump into Star Wars: Destiny, if only to relive the joy of opening boosters!

Image Credits: Fantasy Flight Games

An elegant solution.

Board game apps tend to be hit-and-miss when it comes to accessibility features, so when I encounter a color vision issue I often just uninstall and move on.

Lost Cities started out problematic for me. The card colors are subtle, and the faded card-placement spots above them even more so. In particular, I could not identify the two colors on the far right. My handy-dandy WhatColor tool told me the pixels in those areas included the following:

• Dark Olive Green, Dark Khaki, and Peru
• Coral, Light Salmon, and Sienna

But everything changed when I entered the magic settings screen. Options were basic, consisting of two volume controls (sound effects and music) and this heavenly option.

High Contrast Mode changes the card colors to a brighter, more easily-distinguishable palette. Now I’m back in the game, finding lost cities and destroying my foes!

Kudos to The Coding Monkeys for their work on this app (and Carcassonne, among others), and their attention to accessibility.  You can find Lost Cities for iOS on the app store.

Image Credits: Thames & Kosmos; The Coding Monkeys

Spiceless in Seattle.

Century: Spice Road looks like my kind of game, I’ve heard great things about it, and I love cardamom! But without a major redesign of all game elements, colorblind gamers like me simply cannot play it.

I can’t confidently name any color in the image above. Some are darker than others. All appear to be some kind of yellow-orange-red-brown-green, as far as I can tell.

Meeple Like Us described the color issue in their 2017 accessibility teardown of Century: Spice Road.

“Colour is used as the sole channel of information for identifying the four different spices, and those with Protanopia and Deuteranopia will find it very difficult to distinguish between saffron and cardamom.”

I had based my initial color concerns off screen shots and other reviewers. Sometimes I have a different experience once I view and hold the pieces in my hands. And everyone’s color vision deficiency is different, so I’ve found that sometimes I can navigate “non-colorblind-friendly” games just fine.

My friendly local gaming store had a used copy available, so I was hopeful I might be able to distinguish the colors once I could see them in person.

Nope.

Colorblind Mod?

I’ve been thinking and talking to others about colorblind-friendly upgrades of board games, so I looked at some options for Century: Spice Road. The cubes could be replaced easily enough by custom items from Meeple Source to represent the spices. However, the cards have the same color-only identifier for each cube, so I would need to redesign each card to match the new spice bits.

I could also add letters or symbols to each face of the cubes, then replicate the symbology on each card. But at some point I lose the theme abstraction, reducing the “fun factor” of the game.

New Edition, Expansions, Ideas?

No revised edition of Century: Spice Road is in the works that I could find, and each expansion appears to build on the core game and use the same cubes. In the end, I’m disappointed to miss out on what appears to be a really fun game, and I’d love to learn if anyone has discovered a successful workaround.

Image Credits: CoolStuffInc (top).  Brian Chandler (bottom)

“So it’s not just a clever name.” – Wayne Campbell, Wayne’s World

The gold standard of colorblind accessibility is double coding, which provides color-vision-deficient users additional information beyond colors. It is a valuable strategy to help us navigate any experience, including roadways, restaurant menus, and tabletop games. A Portuguese company, ColorADD, has gone so far as to develop a symbolic language around color. They recently added the ColorADD symbols to a colorblind-friendly version of UNO.

Fantastic Factories—designed, developed, illustrated and published by Joseph Z. Chen and Justin Faulkner—is one of 2019’s big hits.

It’s also one of this year’s most colorful games. As Joseph shared with me, this was by design.

“One thing to note in regards to art direction is that Fantastic Factories’ aesthetic and bright colors are very distinct and a big part of the game as a product in regards to shelf and table presence.”

Fantastic Factories is a dice placement, engine building game for 1-5 players who build a set of factories, roll dice, and then use those dice as workers to manufacture goods. It’s a classic easy-to-teach, difficult-to-master puzzle with just enough randomness that I can blame the dice when I lose.

I love it.

In particular, I enjoy the bright colors, thought I was initially concerned that with so many different colors I might be at a disadvantage. As it turns out, Justin and Joseph considered this and addressed it quite well, though slightly differently than might be expected. They did not run the design through a colorblind simulator to make sure color-vision-deficient users could distinguish between the colors. Back to Joseph:

“The color palette and choices were decided ‘without’ consideration for color-blindness. However, in the graphic design, Fantastic Factories employs double coding in all cases where color plays a functional role.

Wherever color is used, there is an additional visual element that doesn’t use color. For example, the tool symbols above the Contractors and on the Blueprints are both coded with distinct colors and shapes. Card types have the same double coding — utilizing both color and words (Training cards are red, Monuments are gray, etc.).

This was an intentional decision not just for color-blindness but also because double coding can help reinforce the distinct types. In playtests, we’ve had colorblind players and the feedback we’ve received is that with the double coding, the colors luckily have not been an issue.”

But it wasn’t easy. Due to the multiple game elements and their uses, Fantastic Factories required the use of a lot of different colors. This brought with it complications as the team balanced aesthetics and accessibility.

“One challenge we have had is the limited color space. There are 5 types of blueprints and 4 tool symbols. To employ double coding, we needed a color for each thing. For a while we used the same blue color for Manufacturing-type blueprint cards and also for the Mallet tool symbol. Since the blue colors matched, players assumed the two disparate concepts were somehow related when they were not. In the end, we slightly tweaked the color palette so the blues were a little different, and that seemed to clear up the majority of the confusion.”

Interestingly, colorblind gamers do not tend to “match colors” in this way, so it is unlikely anyone with a color vision deficiency related the Manufacturing blueprints to the Mallet tools. I know I have focused almost exclusively on the symbols, enjoying the bright colors without a need to identify their differences for gameplay.

In the end, Fantastic Factories absolutely lives up to its name, and I highly recommend picking it up at Deep Water Games or your friendly local game store.

Photo Credits: Metafactory Games