A free, open-source color-coding system now exists, and it is the closest anyone has come to building a code that makes any game colorblind-friendly.
In a previous essay, I asked whether a Universal Colorblind Code was possible in gaming, and I listed the reasons ColorADD wasn’t the answer for me. Its symbols aren’t intuitive, some are rotations of each other, and a publisher must license the system, adding an accessibility tax to absorb or pass along to players.
ColorSym, released in June 2026, closes most of those gaps with an open-source symbol set that works without color.
What is ColorSym?
ColorSym came out of Chris Eastridge’s Parks & Potions, a game built entirely on mixing colors. His first attempt to add a colorblind solution hit the ColorADD paywall, and it bothered him enough that he built his own. Luis Francisco, the board game publisher behind Grok Games, then expanded Chris’s game-specific symbols into a standalone open standard.
The system rests on three primary symbols: a dot for red, a line for yellow, and a chevron for blue. Combined colors are created by combining these symbols; orange is red’s dot plus yellow’s line. The full set covers eleven colors: five base colors with symbols (red, yellow, blue, black, white) and six combinations (orange, green, brown, violet, pink, gray). No two symbols are rotations of each other, so a card turned on the table still reads correctly.
What ColorSym Gets Right
- Free permanently. Symbols are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 and the font under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Commercial use, modification, and redistribution are all allowed under share-alike terms without need to request permission.
- Rotation-proof. The symbol set was designed for components that move, which is the specific failure mode that rules out most existing icon sets for tabletop use.
- No language dependency. The symbols carry no text, so the same components ship worldwide.
- Drop-in formats. The site provides a font with seven styles (Regular, Bold, Sharp, Styled, Calligraphic, Pencil, and LCD) plus scalable SVG files. A designer can set the symbols as text in any application that supports custom typefaces.
Next up is Steelwing Games, a publisher intending to use the ColorSym system for upcoming titles.
What’s still missing?
My struggle remains memorization. Nothing about a dot feels like red to me, so without a lot of repetition or a mnemonic, I have not been able to get these symbols to stick. This was my first objection to ColorADD, and it remains here. The system is internally logical, and the combination rule is clever, but the entry cost remains high.
In my 2023 article, I learned about a 2021 essay by Peter Vel, who tackled this same problem. Peter wanted the symbols to be intuitive on top of everything Chris and Luis later solved for, so he started with red flames, a yellow sun, and blue waves, which evolved into this::
Look at Peter’s bottom row next to ColorSym’s primaries. Both systems reduce to a dot, a line, and a chevron. They assign those three marks to different colors. I had already mapped fire, sun, and water onto Peter’s shapes, and ColorSym’s assignment directly collided with it.
Giving it a Try
I have previously argued that each color needs its own symbol to support a truly intuitive system, something like green leaves, orange pumpkins, and white snowflakes. That idea has its own problem: most colors have no obvious icon that works for every theme or culture. Lucky Charms tried it in the 1980s. Green clovers and red balloons are solid. But purple horseshoes?
My preferred path is harder than it looks, which is exactly why ColorSym’s tradeoff makes sense. ColorSym handles two important aspects, cost and rotation, leaving memorization to repetition. I will use ColorSym the next time I help a publisher during game development or mod my own game.
Conclusion
I have wanted a universal colorblind code since 2017, when I first saw ColorADD on UNO cards. ColorSym is the closest anyone has come. It is rotation-proof; covers pink, grey, and brown; carries no language dependency; and costs nothing for a publisher to apply or gamer to use as a mod.
If you want to modify the games already on your shelf, or if you are a designer, developer, or publisher looking for a quality accessibility solution at no cost, ColorSym is a strong next step.
Downloads and documentation are at colorsym.com, with source files on GitHub.
1 Vision Encoding Language, Peter Vel, 2021
Image Credits: Lucky Charms box image property of General Mills. All other images provided by ColorSym.
