As a colorblind gamer, I often start my visit to a Kickstarter board game campaign by asking this question: “Can I even play this?”
Often, the answer is no.
My first look at Dungeon Ball on Kickstarter didn’t go well. The reds and greens were problematic from the start, and I did not see a simple colorblind modification to solve the problem. While I liked the theme and have enjoyed Gabe Barrett’s work, with so many games on the market and a limited gaming budget, I simply wasn’t in the mood to do the extra work.
Then this happened.
Gabe and his graphic designer listened to feedback, identified the need, and made a change to their color palette during the middle of the campaign. From Gabe’s Kickstarter Updates:
One thing I realized recently is that Dungeon Ball isn’t particularly colorblind-friendly because of its heavy use of red and green in the play selection process. So, I talked with Drew, the graphic designer, and he’s going to update the colors for the final version of the game to make everything more accessible. Below, you can see where we’re headed.
I want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy the game, and hopefully this will help with that.
It’s a significant improvement over the original version, switching to new versions or red and green that stand out much better from each other while maintaining the feel of the original artistic vision.
I appreciate Gabe and Drew for their efforts to improve accessibility – especially during the middle of a campaign. See the Dungeon Ball Kickstarter campaign page to back this project!
Gabe Barrett is a long-time supporter of game designers through his podcast and other resources at Board Game Design Lab and on Twitter.
