Hal Jordan
United States
North Carolina
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A few notes: This is a post from my blog (Geekjockblog.com) from this morning. I try and write so even non board gamers might be able to enjoy/understand it so sorry if it seems dumbed down for our crowd.
--Also VERY important-> I don't really care about grammar, so beware.
--Lastly I am a very amateur photographer of game pieces so sorry if they seem crumby.
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.
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 Grande is 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 or cards 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)" http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/68906/colourblindness-and-...
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". 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!
(Edit:added link to the geeklist)
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King Ævil
South Euclid
Ohio
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Another game that uses different symbols with different colors is Circus Flohcati. It has ten different colors, which can challenge just about anyone, but each is paired with a different circus performer. As in Ticket to Ride, many first-time players don't notice the different symbols.
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Judit Szepessy
Canada
London
Canada
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In Pastiche, the cards of which you have to mix and create colours, are numbered.
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Kaiwen Zhang
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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While I'm not color-blind myself, there is a significant population of color-blind gamers which must be taken into account. Some colors are hard to tell apart even for non-color-blind gamers! (Black and blue crystals in Mage Knight: Board Game comes to mind)
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Jared Harkness
United States
Seattle
WA
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Tried teaching Race for the Galaxy to a guy recently, and he was having a bit of trouble with it. Eventually learned he was partially colorblind, and had a hell of a time telling the difference between the green symbols, and the brown symbols, and that game is pretty symbol heavy.
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Hal Jordan
United States
North Carolina
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JaredRules wrote: Tried teaching Race for the Galaxy to a guy recently, and he was having a bit of trouble with it. Eventually learned he was partially colorblind, and had a hell of a time telling the difference between the green symbols, and the brown symbols, and that game is pretty symbol heavy.
It's a shame too b/c it's a real fun game (IMHO). The "burst"/wind-fall thing around the planet symbols are so subtle that it makes the colors even harder even for non color blind peeps
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I think awareness of the issue has surely come a long way amd many designers are aware of how common it is, specially among males.
That said, many games would need to change a lot through design to be perfectly playable for color-blind people.
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Werner Bär
Germany
Karlsruhe
Baden
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GeekJock wrote: Use Symbols --- A perfect example of this is Ticket to Ride. [...]
, but this is a perfect example of how the game can make one simple subtle change and yet cater to the CB demographic.
A very good example. Especially since the first edition of Ticket to Ride was virtually unplayable for colorblind people, and these symbols were added for later editions / print runs.
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Steve Mercer
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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I'm colourblind and if the game has symbols + colours, I swear I do not even notice the colour. Ticket to ride is such a good example.. I just finished a game with others who were not colourblind, near the end of the game they said 'oh there are symbols on each card too!', while this was the first thing I noticed when the box was opened.
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♬♪♪ ♫ ♩ ♫♫♪ ♩♬♪ ♫
Australia
S-E Melbourne
Victoria
What happens when typographers play Busen Memo? . . . . . . . . . ὠὡ ὢ ὣ ὤ ὥ ὦ ὧ
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Re: Re: Should more attention be paid to the color blind by designers/publishers?
I am colourblind - and I play with yellow. This is a problem when I play with either of my two colourblind friends, because they do too...
We find there is some problem with about 50% of games, but in many cases it is fairly minor or easily overcome. Some games are simply impossible, and this is often easily avoidable. Caylus is arguably the most high profile example.
Roughly 95% of all people with colourblindness have problems with red and green, but are OK with blue and yellow. So in most cases difficulties arise from the use of red and green components, although purple/blue, red/brown, green/brown, brown/purple combos are problematic as well. The remaining 5% of cases mostly find blue/yellow difficult - dark blue and light yellow may still be distinguished based on their relative brightness, but colours that rely on combining these will be very difficult - purple/red, orange/red, etc.
Which raises the question: why do game designers dislike black and white pieces? Why red, green, blue & yelllow all the time? Black, white, blue and red would work for almost all of us!
General_Norris wrote: I think awareness of the issue has surely come a long way amd many designers are aware of how common it is, specially among males.
That said, many games would need to change a lot through design to be perfectly playable for color-blind people.
Many publishers and designers are still woefully ignorant and seem quite apathetic about colourblindness. In the majority of cases the problem is caused by use of generic cubes instead of chits with symbols. Macao, for instance, does not require cubes: each colour could be substituted with a symbol, and the cubes could be replaced with cardboard chits. These could be different shapes (square, circle, hex, triangle, elipse, rectangle..?) and printed in different colours too. The dice could be manufactured with a modified 1-pip, if people really want to!
BGG has a Colourblind Gamers Guild, come check us out for some links that might be informative. We are hoping that the new site design will incorporate "Colour Dependency" in addition to Language Dependency on each of the game pages.
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Matthew Evans
United States
Stanwood
Washington
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I am also colorblind and have had a difficult enough time with some games. It has become a harmless running joke in my gaming group and is entirely friendly. I give large kudos to Days of Wonder for their use of symbols in Ticket To Ride and have written them telling so. But I recently docked them points for their Ipod and Xbox live version of the game. For some odd reason they have decided not to include the symbols on the cards. This is very frustrating for at least once per game I collect enough cards to finish my grand plan only to realize that it is not the right color. Does it really take that much memory to put little symbols on the cards and tracks? Or at least to pick colors that are so divergent that you can't get them confused. (And we are not even going to mention the myriad video games that at some point decide to use color as a puzzle to get further along in the game)
I am also looking at you Battlestar Galatica and Lord of Vegas for your color choices. Thankfully Battlestar at least puts the colors on the crisis cards in the same order as they are laid out on the board. That helps a lot. And why did Lord of Vegas need to have semi transparent chips for property markers which when placed on the board wash the colors out so that red and green look nearly the same.
Please game companies take 5 minutes and ask during the design if the game could use one little thing to help the color blind gamer.
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bgg.cc/thing/22235
United States
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My color vision is fine, but I strongly prefer color as a secondary/reinforcing cue. It's an issue of good design, not just color blindness.
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Johannes Sjolte
Denmark
Copenhagen
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It would not only be a help to color blind but also a help to everyone that plays in poor lighting
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I can see the issue presented here. But I would say "no".
I have never designed a game nor do I want to. But I have play tested a couple and the amount of work that goes into it is incredible. I think to design a game to try and take into account something like this would be daunting to say the least.
I am a special ed teacher and I do a lot of educational testing. I have to check for colour blindness as part of one of the assessments in my career. Only once have I had a student not be able to do certain sections of my assessment because they were unable to distiguish between the colours being used. That said, the colours on my assessment are very distinctive in my opinion and I can see why with many of the games we play why it would be much more of an issue. The reason why I am assessing many of these students to begin with is their reading ability.
To me, the bigger issues game designers need to look at is the reading level of their games. I think that is a bigger barrier to more people enjoying our hobby than this issue.
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Hal Jordan
United States
North Carolina
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kohlhatter wrote: I can see the issue presented here. But I would say "no".
I have never designed a game nor do I want to. But I have play tested a couple and the amount of work that goes into it is incredible. I think to design a game to try and take into account something like this would be daunting to say the least.
I have to disagree 100%
If you do said work on what you put heart and soul into, why not take what amounts to a fraction of the work to make it so all of the seeing population will be able to enjoy it.
Remember we are not asking designers to make pieces out of gold or diamond. Simply be more careful with player pieces/ colors on boards on or cards. Or the very least when color is imperative make symbols to go along with these colors.
Like someone said above, there is no reason why in many games they couldn't include white or black as colors instead of one red and one slightly less red which is what they call purple (for example).
It's one small detail which could generate (or LOSE) a good chunk of money for a publisher designer.
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Scott Thompson
Fort Worth
Texas
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Agreed it seems simple. I think A game like ingenious does really good with that. The game is all about color, but each one also has a distinctive shape. Thus it's still easy to tell regardless. I'm not color blind but it's something that isn't too hard but opens it up a lot. Especially in a industry that is mostly dominated by males and about 8% of males having some form of color blindness according to one estimate I read (Only about 0.5% of females are because it's on the X chromosome and one non-colorblind can override a colorblind gene).
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Lucas Townsend
United States
Ridgecrest
California
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I really don't want to sound insensitive, but as I am not colorblind, I don't know much of how it works or what colors colorblind people can and can't see. I am a game designer and if this is a major issue, which I believe it is, I would like some feedback on what helps and what doesn't, and what colors you can sense. Thanks, once again, am not trying to be insensitive or discriminatory, I am just ignorant.
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Roger Munk
United States
Lebanon
Oregon
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Race for the Galaxy is the number one game I'd love to play, but can't due to being color blind. I also remember having to ask the guy next to me what color each card was in Bang. I agree, using symbols like in Ticket to Ride is a great adaptation that works well.
Lucas, most color blind folks will have a tough time with reds/greens/browns and blues/purples. Sometimes lighter greens and pale yellows trip me up. So, if you can come up with a color mix of white, black, natural wood, red or green or brown, yellow, and blue or purple, you'll do fine in your designs. Symbols/shapes make it even better. For instance, things are a bit subtle but doable with Agricola, but I bought animeeples and veggimeeples for it, and it's even better.
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Christopher DeFrisco
United States
Ashland
Oregon
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Lucas (et al),
There are free utilities out there that help us non-color blind understand the problems and see images exactly as they would appear to the color blind among us.
Empires wrote: I really don't want to sound insensitive, but as I am not colorblind, I don't know much of how it works or what colors colorblind people can and can't see. I am a game designer and if this is a major issue, which I believe it is, I would like some feedback on what helps and what doesn't, and what colors you can sense. Thanks, once again, am not trying to be insensitive or discriminatory, I am just ignorant.
There is a web site called Vischeck - http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php, which lets you upload images to see how they might appear if you were color blind. It also includes a plug-in for Photoshop!
Here is an example of before and after using Visicheck. The image on the right is what a typical color blind person sees (from Through The Desert - orig image by OldestManOnMySpace):
Here are some prior geek lists about this topic:
"ROYGBIV? More like ROY(R/G?)B(dB)(drB)*.": How I Modified My Games So I Could Actually Play Them: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/17031
Colorblind-Friendly Games: The Counterpoint to My Other GeekList: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/17103
Games for color blind people to avoid: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/15772
Games by color-blind buddy Kevin can play: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/831
Games that use color as the only way to communicate something - not colorblind friendly: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/9917
Colorblind unfriendly games: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/2706
You don't even have to be colour blind: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/12408
Color Blind Images: http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/20738/color-blind-images
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Matthew Evans
United States
Stanwood
Washington
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Lucas here are three ideas to help:
-If possible include shapes or symbols on the cards and the board to help differentiate the items. Ticket to Ride is the perfect example of this. Each card has a symbol and that symbol is on the routes on the board.
-When picking colors try not to pick colors that are nearby on the spectrum. Why do you need light purple and light blue? Why not a dark blue and a light purple? Also give a little love to black and white pieces as well.
-The last is if color is important make the artwork different. Ascending Empires depends on color for their game. The planets each have a specific color but their color palette is so close that I had a hard time telling them apart. The only way I could do it is by the slight differences in how the planets looked. One color had a white cloud on it while the other didn't. Small clues like that help a lot.
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Steve Mercer
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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LOL Christopher..
I was wondering what the differences in these pictures were (did someone repaint their camels?) I should have read your text first, a very accurate colourblind reference if they look identical to me!
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Hans Brouwer
Netherlands
Utrecht
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This is a non-issue. I am CB and in rare occasions this causes me difficulties when gaming. There is no need to burden the industry with an extra issue. Where do you draw the line?
I have a friend who misses part of his hand&fingers. This accident happened so long ago, he is quite deft in manipulating the scores of small counters of many wargames. However, my heart cringes sometimes if he runs into troubles, sometimes. I offer regularly to play a block-game, or a miniatures game, but he declines, he can do it he says.
So again I say, let's not make an issue of this and close this thread.
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DORGON
United States
Round Rock
Texas
Entertainment for those who don't think young & don't think old
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I like the color variations of today's designs. I think for them to only make color options that work for the colorblind would sanitize the whole design process to in effect deal with a small group of consumers. If I were to design a game, I don't think not using colors that doesn't clash with the colorblind would not be on my agenda.
SO I would say no, I don't think more attention needs to be made.
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bgg.cc/thing/22235
United States
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MWChapel wrote: for them to only make color options that work for the colorblind would sanitize the whole design process
It's an outrage that designers aren't using more infrared and ultraviolet.
...I take back my earlier comment. It turns out that my vision has some color deficiency. Thankfully, a lot of designs are subtly reinforced with symbols, patterns, and variations on hue/shade/tint/tone.
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In a prototype of a game I'm designing, I use 4 different resources and you only get 9 over the course of the game. They also go back and forth pretty fast. Right now I have them as tokens with the symbol printed on it and a colour.
Someone suggested that it'd probably be easier with cubes to which I proudly stated that when I design games I always design with colour blindness in mind and would never use colours if they weren't accompanied by a symbol.
Tokens may be more expensive than cubes for sure, but it seems silly to me to make a print media that's designed to be used and understood, unusable and confusing for a select few when the fixes are simple.
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Posted Mon Feb 6, 2012 4:00 pm
