By 
Abletop Episode 2 Quick Points:
📦 Consider accessible packaging options such as adding loops, tags or stickers.
🫳 Make space in the box insert for grabbing components, such as indents or foam.
🌍 Consider Eco-friendly packaging for better environmental impact and potentially easier to open packaging.
♟️ Provide information on components for physically heavier games to help with alternative storage solutions and consider common sizes e.g. A4.
🏗️ Use trays and personal player packs to reduce setup and teardown.
🗃️ Provide ways to sort components of similar types i.e. different cards that are the same size. Can you use the insert to help separate them.
📱 Create a companion app to either automate parts of the game, provide options to reduce components/table space, track character status, or roll dice.
🖐️ Provide low-mobility alternatives for components, such as Frosthaven’s book of maps in place of the map pieces.
🗺️ Provide board references that can help players find locations on larger boards.
🔠 Check visibility of the labels on your board and how they are affected by 3D pieces during play.
⚓ Consider component anchoring – like recessed boards – for helping keep pieces in place.
🎛️ Check tension on moveable/assembled components like clips, dials. Is there a more static version you can provide to players as an option.
🃏 Provide ways to make tucking cards easier such as sleeves, raised areas or recesses.
🎲 Consider dice, how heavy and how many, and think about providing a tower to reduce physical energy cost and avoid dice disrupting the play space.
♟️ Provide card sleeves or thicker components for things that need to be handled often, or adapting the board to provide areas of purchase.
⚖️ Provide accommodations that can level the playing field for groups with a range of dexterity needs, such as different difficulties of components or asymmetric roles.
📂 Provide files that players can download and resize if they need to.
⌛ Provide ways to reduce or remove time pressures, potentially set per player.
🎯Consider the amount of component manipulation and accuracy in your games; lining things up, moving pieces, and what options you can provide to reduce those.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:43 – Box & Packaging
12:46 – Set Up & Tear Down
21:17 – Components
36:20 – Motion in Games
44:49 – Dexterity Mechanics
53:16 – Time Constraints
56:02 – Closing Thoughts
57:00 – Outro
Transcript
Laura:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Abletop, a six-part miniseries where myself, Laura Kate Dale, and my lovely co-host, Cari Watterton, talk about boardgame accessibility in various facets. And hey, if you’re someone trying to work on making a board game accessible, maybe we teach you some board game accessibility concepts. We’re back! We are on part two of our little six-part series. What are we talking about today, Cari?
Cari:
We’re going to talk about mobility and dexterity in board games. So this is going to cover, hopefully, we’re going to cover everything from packaging to setting up, tear down time, and motion in games as well, and dexterity games a little bit too.
Laura:
Indeed. And I think we brought this up in part one, but just in case we didn’t, if there’s anything that we find that we miss, if there’s anything we intend to talk about today, and then when we’re doing the edit, we go: Oh, we should have talked about this! Toward the end of this little six part series, we’re going to have an episode that is miscellaneous bits and bobs and also stuff that during the six weeks we were like: Ah, we should have talked about that, we’ll throw it in at the end. So if there’s anything we’ve missed, there’s a good chance in like four weeks from now we’ll catch it in the little catch up at the end.
Cari:
That’s a lot of faith in us!
Laura:
Yeah, we know what we’re doing, where we’re good, we got this!
But yeah, in terms of mobility and dexterity, I want to start us off on talking about box and packaging design because this is something that I think comes up a lot no matter what kind of product design you’re doing, making sure that you have accessible packaging. I come from a background of doing a lot of stuff in video game accessibility, and while there are great examples in the video game space of accessible packaging, one thing that really annoys me is that you only ever see accessible packaging in the video game space for accessibility focused products. Like you’ll see some of the like the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a great example of accessible packaging in the video game space, but it’s because it’s an accessibility specific controller. A lot of board game design I’ve not seen take on board any of the accessible packaging considerations that I’ve seen the video game industry start to pick up on. But I feel like that’s because you don’t really see accessibility specific board games that would then get someone to stop and think about accessible packaging design.
Cari:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I would agree. I think like looking at the Xbox Adaptive controller packaging, one of the big things that they talk about is like the loops and the tags that they have that make it so much easier to open boxes and things.
And I’m thinking about, I’m going to bring this up early, but I’m thinking about like Frosthaven. It’s a really, really deep box and it’s got a lot of layers and full disclosure. Like we decanted it into like three different tupperware boxes so that we could access things a bit more easily. But with that, when you have all those different layers, there’s not a lot there to help you actually like take those out. I think there’s some things, a lot of games work on a really nice insert and I love an insert. Like a board game insert that also has space for expansions is one thing that I’m a big fan of, but there are things that they can do with that where you don’t just make the size where the cards are going to go in. But you also could include a little bit of like a tab so that you can actually get your finger down to pick up the pack of cards. But there’s a lot of examples where it’s just here is your rectangle where the card is going in. And I think if you were already making those custom inserts, that’s one step where it’s like, okay, we’re already making this. What can we look at and make this a little bit easier from a mobility standpoint to access these components?
Laura:
Exactly. So like basic idea is having if you’ve got any kind of like stickers that you need to take off of things that are sealing things shut, be that on your outside box or like say a plastic packaging on packs of cards inside the box, making sure that there is something that isn’t like flush to the surface that you can get some purchase and grip on. Examples of that would be things like stickers that deliberately don’t have sticky material on one side of them so that you can get purchase. Being, stickers that have like a loop built into them that isn’t stuck down that you can use to pull across. Avoiding, if you can, things like twist ties in packaging.
Cari:
Yes!
Laura:
Realising that a lot of the time if something is in your box and in a position, it’s probably going to stay there. You probably don’t need to stick down, tie down, fastened down as many things as you think you need to do. Part of that is for things like, I think loop design is like, designing things with loops you can grab on to is so applicable across the board for accessible packaging. It’s great for things like I’m trying to lift this tray out and I don’t have the dexterity to get my fingers around the edge of the box. It’s great for this single sheet of paper, like an instruction manual. I struggle to pick that up off the table. Just a loop on one end that you can use to lift it more easily. Add loops on everything if you can. I fucking love when we got loops on stuff!
Cari:
Yes! Loops are fantastic, I also love – well you see in the Xbox accessibility controller packaging – where you’ve got the little sections that pull up and they’ve got loops on them. So if you’ve got like that multi-layer thing going on in your boxes, you can add loops onto there too. Something interesting that you kinda mentioned there I was, you said a lot of different things and my mind kind of went.
Laura:
Sorry, yea!
Cari:
No, no, that’s fine!
Like, I think I want to talk about baggies for a second, the little like zip seal bags, and some of those are great, but like, I found them in varying degrees of okay. I’m going to call out like the Wingspan ones here. They’re hot garbage. Yeah, they’re so tough. I literally we got the expansion for wingspan, and I just, like, chucked all of those bags away. I went, like, sewed my own fabric bags to put stuff in there.
Laura:
You don’t know what a seal to. You don’t want the seal to be stronger than the plastic because like the number of times I’ve ripped one of those bags because the bag has given way before the seal.
Cari:
Yes, 100%. That’s happened with so many of those Wingspan bags. I’ve just been like over it. There’s a lot of cool things happening in eco friendly packaging now as well that I’m seeing. So instead of having cards that are wrapped in that like plastic, where there’s that tiny little tab that you have to try and get, and only half the time the actual tag thing comes with it. They’re wrapped in like paper instead and it’s much more like unwrapping a gift where you’ve got a much larger area to be able to get purchase on. And then if you are doing that, are there, is there extra bits of loops that you can put on on those sides? Like if you’re just opening the top of the thing? So yeah, I think there’s a lot of cool things with the eco friendly packaging that’s going on that could be a cool to look at: is there more that can be done with those? Are there parts of that that are a little bit more accessible from a mobility standpoint?
Laura:
Other things I’ve been thinking about in terms of making board game boxes more accessible. By necessity, a lot of board game boxes are very wedged right up to the edges to keep components from moving around in the box, and I think that’s totally understandable for keeping everything from jostling about in your box. But it does mean that there’s often very little space to get your fingers around something, to lift it up a little layer of foam, just a thin layer of foam around the outside edges, something that you can push your fingers past to get purchase under a tray. But that still is enough to keep your trays in place so that they’re not shuffling around in the box. I think could go a long way to being making it easier to lift trays out of boxes.
Cari:
Absolutely. Or again, putting an indent in parts of the box so that there is that built-in space for you to be able to get on. We’ll talk about it in a little bit, but I’m thinking about the Stardew Valley Board game has a really lovely tray in it, which really helps with the set up. But again, it goes right to the edges. So it’s like, yeah, trying to like get underneath it and pull out. It’s quite thin, so it’s not too bad for someone like me that’s got like one inch nails. But it can be tricky for other people, especially if you’ve got it’s like trying to get in between those gaps and try not to upset all the tiles that are in that insert as well.
Laura:
Indeed, I’m on, on the topic of like box accessibility. This isn’t an associated topic, I guess, but your physical box density or size that there were going to be parts of that that are inevitable facts of game design. But it is worth keeping in mind. One of my favourite board games is Everdell Complete Collection. Everdell with all of its expansions and it, wonderful game! It’s got like a wooden tree that a bunch of your cards go on and these huge sections, boxes and tiles. It is a nightmare to just get that board game off the shelf and onto a table is not something that’s going to be accessible for everyone. And there is a degree of keeping in mind; are people going to be boxed out of playing, playing your game? Because like, obviously that’s, you know, someone could just purchase the expansions separately, etc. or something like that. But again, you brought up Frosthaven. Frosthaven you you can’t buy the parts separately. The only way to get it is a single box that is going to be a lot of lifting and dexterity to get to the table.
Cari:
Yeah, it’s, it’s huge and it’s heavy and like, yeah, we’ve got it in. We’ve put it in loads of much shallower trays, much shallower boxes so that we can just – we’ve an under bed storage box that’s got most of the stuff in it and we can put that on a little table to the side and then we’ve got smaller boxes for like the map and the pieces, the jigsaw pieces that make up the maps and the rulebooks and things like that. But again, it’s, you know, when it arrived, it was like; she’s heavy, she’s- this is intense. And we immediately were like, no, we need to decant this. Like, we can’t like, this is just it’s not even going to fit on our shelves apart from anything else. Yeah, like just the physicality. Oh, sorry. Go for it!
Laura:
One thing I will say in Frosthaven’s favor in that regard is they did pre-release have information of like we have designed this with certain things in mind for like if you want to take the board sections out of the box in a safe way, we’ve designed them so that they will fit in an A4 document binder. So that you can, like we’ve thought of a storage solution that would get components out of the box to save weight, and we can tell you the components will fit if you sort them like this instead. And I think that is great. Having in mind, if someone does need to decant things out of this box to make this box lift-able, do we have like commonly accessible in multiple countries solutions that we are standardised to fit?
Cari:
Yes, absolutely. And I think again, that transparency of like giving players information about all the components ahead of time and how those are going to like, fit together and how they, like you say, how they could be decanted. Is it common things people are going to have access to? That is something that’s yeah. To its credit absolutely! 100%. I think that’s fantastic like yeah thinking about this is going to be a barrier. What are the ways that we can best sort of, if we can’t fix it in the actual product, what can we do to give players as much information as possible to be able to make those accommodations?
Laura:
I think that is something really important to keep in accessibility conversations is sometimes you’ll get- the thing you want to create is going to have inherent barriers to accessibility in it. We’re not saying you can’t create that thing. We’re suggesting be aware of your accessibility barriers and try and preempt ways that someone could work around them.
Cari:
Absolutely. I think this is probably going to come up in every episode that we do. But like games are made of barriers and for board games, it’s, you know, you don’t have the settings menu. So yeah, design with the barriers, but acknowledge them and see what you can do to fix them or see if you can provide assistance for other people. So yeah, yeah.
Laura:
Shall we move on to talking about set up?
Cari:
Yes, absolutely. Do you want to kick this off or shall I go?
Laura:
I can take this off. Why not, sure!
So, this is going to come up. This is another thing that’s going to come up in various episodes we do, but, set up complexity and like tear down complexity, in terms of being an accessibility barrier for board games. Definitely has intersections with mobility and dexterity. The more components and bits and stuff that isn’t in trays and stuff that you have to get out of baggies and manually organise and set up, that’s going to be a barrier to like any big game, the set up and tear down time is going to be a barrier to people wanting to get it to the table. That is all the more a barrier when someone has dexterity issues. If someone has mobility or dexterity issues, you are going to dramatically magnify how long that set up and tear down takes and you are going to hit that barrier of it’s not worth the set up time a lot quicker I think is worth keeping in mind.
Cari:
I think it’s not always limited to like, bigger games as well. I think an example we got a game called Canvas recently is a gorgeous, very nice little game, but you have all of these, all these ribbons that you award and we put them into individual bags at the beginning and then it just became a massive faff. It’s like getting those out.
So I went and just bought a little tray that I could just you could pop the tray open and it’s done. And they’ve all got their own little sections. But it did start to become like, I really resent the fact that, like, I don’t want to mix these all together in one bag because I want to have them separate. But having them separate means that it’s going to be a faff. So looking for another solution for that. So yeah, thinking about like what is the set up time in comparison to the playtime because we do have a couple of games where it’s like, this is a really nice game to play, but the set up makes it not worth it.
Laura:
Yeah, I think a lot of that is like how much dexterity is going to be needed in that set up. Like how much am I going to have to sift through very similar looking things and precisely separate them? Am I, you know, going through an army of like generic, unpainted minifigs that I have to make sure are all lined up so that I can find them at quick reference? Making sure that like there isn’t too much, I have to pick something out from something near each other before the game’s even begun.
Cari:
Absolutely. I’ll chat a little bit about Zoo Tycoon, the board game. I love it. It’s amazing. It’s a massive game and it does have a significant set up time. But because the game lasts for like 3 hours, it’s kind of paid off. It pays for itself. But in terms of like the number of things, again, they’ve gone down like an eco friendly packaging system and they have these nice little boxes. So each animal, like there’s pairs of animals that share these boxes. So it’s not like a box per animal, but a box per two species and but it’s a lot of them. And then it’s also player boards and then it’s also this massive score track and then putting everything on the massive score track. And then you’ve also got the track where you’re looking at the round tracking and the sponsors that you have available for that thing. And it’s just there’s a lot of it. The box is very heavy, it’s very dense and it’s just, yeah, from a mobility standpoint, there’s a lot there and there’s also a lot from a table space standpoint which we’ll talk a little bit about later. But like yeah. In terms of yeah, sorry,
Laura:
No, go ahead!
Cari:
In terms of like the fact that it’s this huge amount of board and a huge amount of different things that you need to, like you say, separate from each other and put all these little bits in different places. Make sure that you’ve got your bits in front of you. It can be a little bit overwhelming. And especially like in terms of the great scale of it. So yeah, but for someone for I don’t think, I don’t think that game is very accessible from mobility standpoint at all, just because of the sheer volume of things and the amount of table space that takes up as well.
Laura:
Yeah, I’m on that note. I think that there is real value in board game design where you can just grab a tray and hand it to a player and they’re ready to go because I think one of the things that’s worth keeping in mind about dexterity and mobility disabilities in board game set up is it’s no fun being the one person at the table that goes. Everyone else is set up and it’s like, I need another 5 minutes to finish sorting all the bits. Even if no one at the table is actively judging you, it can feel a bit all eyes on you having like, someone can just hand you the tray and everything’s ready can take a lot of that pressure off of feeling like; I need to keep up with the dexterity of being ready so that I’m not holding up the game. One of my favourite examples of this is Stardew Valley, the Stardew Valley board game, has really nice; you just take out the tree and hand it to someone and they’re ready to go. I absolutely love when board games do that. I think it really helps.
Cari:
I do as well. I think the Flamecraft Deluxe edition has these little trays for the different the different resources you can gather. And it’s not like a per player thing, but like they’ve got two of them, which is fantastic because the board is long, so you can have one at each end or one at each side of the table. And then it’s not just like one central resource pile, it’s like these two separate ones. And again, they’re trays. So everything is always organised. You never have to like reorganise it. And yeah, it just kind of speeds that up.
We did this for, with The Fox Experiment you’ve got like things that you need to start as the first game, and they had enough large bags in it that we were able to just like package up right here is purple player, yellow player, blue player and then that just makes it so much easier. You just hand someone their pack and say, This is everything that you need to put it down in front of you in a way that’s going to make sense for you. And so, yeah, that can help a lot as opposed to having lots of different things. Yeah, I agree. The Stardew Valley Board game as well. That’s specifically for the vegetables and fruits that you’re growing and they’re all really nicely organised by season. And yes it’s just it’s just a nice little bit of like this makes this less overwhelming because I could not imagine trying to sort all of those tiles before every single game.
Laura:
Yep. And on that note, anything that can reduce the number of components you’re having to handle can really help with mobility and dexterity. An example that we have in a little planning document for this was Frosthaven and Gloomhaven – they’re going to come up a lot as examples of games that are quite – they’ve got some accessibility barriers with them. But one of the things they do is they have an official companion app that you can use to automate several of the steps of the game, but also reduce the number of physical components you need to be managing at the table. And you know, that’s great for table space for reducing the number of things you’re having to reach for and manage. But it’s also really good for just reducing the number of things you might accidentally knock or nudge or have to be handling at a time, reducing it down to one input that stays in one place. So good.
Cari:
Oh yeah, absolutely. One of the things I love about the Frosthaven / Gloomhaven example is; you have all the components to play without the app like by default, and then you just use the app for as many of the things as you want it to. So we use it for managing monsters. Like we don’t even touch the Monster deck or those- they’ve got like cards that are divided up into triangles where you’ve got to track health and stuff and it’s just like, absolutely not. We will be tracking this on the app. Thank you. And things like that. It’s just really good. I enjoy that a lot and I think there’s not a lot of examples of board games that use apps in that way to help reduce things.
I think Alchemists is one where if you don’t have the app then you can have one person kind of managing this, like what are the combinations in terms of putting these together? But again, that adds a big sort of dexterity barrier, adds things for tablespace, adds things from a cognitive perspective as well. So yeah, using apps to see and provide it as an option. Like you don’t need to use this app, but we have something here that can reduce these things, can reduce table space. And yeah, you mentioned something really good there about knocking components. Shall move on to talking a little bit about components?
Laura:
Yeah, before we do, I did have one last thing.
Cari:
Sorry!
Laura:
You know, no, just before I forget it because it’s not on our document and I just had a thought, which is still talk about Frosthaven and Gloomhaven, another way of reducing components and the amount of things that could get knocked about Frosthaven, me and my wife recently picked up a- So by default, that game you have all these like tiles that you lay out and connect together. We recently picked up a book where you just open it to a certain page and it has printed on it, the hexes. And you open the book pages and just lay it out on the table because this is what Jaws of the Lion, the sort of mini Frosthaven does. They have books that do it. Sorry, mini Gloomhaven! Frosthaven has books now where you can just open to the page and it’s got the hex layout printed on the page. Fewer things that you need to micromanage and that you have to plug into each other and could get knocked about.
Cari:
Love it. Oh my God. Yeah. That was one of our biggest things when we- because we did Jaws of the Lion and then we did Frosthaven and then we were like, I just want a book. I just want to go back to the book and just open the page that you need. And it’s all done trying to find all the pieces and-
Laura:
It’s good!
Cari:
Right? Oh, okay. Amazing. Sorry for stopping the components bit! I was just like, while I remember I need to bring this up. No, that’s really, really helpful. Like, yeah, I think the books- is an official licensed book as well?
Laura:
Yeah, this is an official one. Yeah.
Cari:
Fantastic! Amazing! Yes! Providing options for players and especially when something like that is going to reduce, as you say, so many of the mobility barriers in it. That’s fantastic. Yes. Okay. We love that!
Laura:
But yes, you were going to components.
Cari:
You go for it, you kick us off.
Laura:
Oh, sure. So in terms of components, there’s a lot of stuff to do to factor in with some of it we feel we’ve touched on a little bit already, but board size and figure density are really important factors to keep in mind because a lot of what we’ve been talking about with mobility and dexterity so far has been like using your hands to manipulate things.
But there’s a lot of other ways that that can be a barrier. For example, do you need to stand up to get a good look at the board from, like a top down perspective to get a proper picture of what’s going on? Example of this for me that I really struggle with is War of the Ring, the Lord of the Rings board game. That is a huge map with a lot of like individual sections that have place names that you might not be reading the right way up depending on how you sat around the table. With really dense armies wedged into spaces, chances are you’re not going to be able to see accurately how many units are on which space, where the barrier between one space and another ends and begins, what place you’re trying to name for if a card comes up with a place name. Often the only option is to stand up and look from a more top down perspective, which is not going to be accessible to everyone. And, I don’t know what you can do mechanically, like as a workaround for that, but I do know that needs to be a consideration that you think about when thinking about game design.
Cari:
Absolutely. I’ve got a couple of examples. I played El Grande recently, and one of the things that was just really, really cute about that was you have a little island that the castle lives on the Castello or, I don’t know, probably the wrong word, but it’s got two labels on it because the castle is a big 3D object and it has a label both above and below it. So it means that people from both sides of the table can read it. And I was just like, that’s such a neat little like, you know, they’re already printing this board. It didn’t cover up anything else important, but it was a really nice consideration for just allowing people to be able to read that from different angles.
And I think Ticket to Ride is an example for me in terms of the board can be quite big. We’ve got the original USA version and one of the things that I really like about it, obviously it was designed this way, but you’ve got your routes that you need to do, like between like one place to another place and it has like a mini version of the board printed on it and it gives you the general area of those two places. Like I say, general area, it’s very precise, but because it’s small, it’s like, okay, cool. I can very quickly look through these and I can understand, like where these are in relation to each other. I still find that I’m having to like stand up and look over the board to get exactly which route I need to get to. But having that kind of reference on the card of if you’re referencing something on the board, have a reference of the board and be like it is in this area, I think would be a really nice sort of accessibility by design way to help with that.
Laura:
But for War of the Ring, what I wouldn’t give for a version of the, just a top down view of the map that I can have in my player area, but it’s a small version that doesn’t have any units on the map and that I can look at without having to stand up to look up.
Outside of like that sort of example of something that a designer could do, there are workarounds the player can do and this shouldn’t be a thing you have to rely on. But I think it’s worth bringing up as potential workarounds that could work for some groups, for some table setups. If you, for example, have like a webcam and a tripod mount, maybe with a with an arm, if you could set a webcam facing top down view of your board, throw a view up on it on a screen, you know, on your laptop or your TV in a room that could be a workaround someone could use for providing a top down view for someone who might not be able to stand up and take that top down view as something that’s available. I don’t think that’s something board games should like. You know, I’m not telling designers to recommend that in their rulebooks, but it’s think about like that’s the kind of workaround and someone might feel the need to use. Can you find a way to stop them needing that?
Cari:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, I remember when COVID was happening, we had that kind of set up for D&D, when we really wanted to use physical maps. And so it was like, okay, cool, because I did a lot of mini painting and it is a lot of effort to set up that kind of thing in the first place. And especially if a game isn’t something that’s going to be a long form thing. Yeah, then thinking about is that going to be a barrier and like you say, a little reference of what the board looks like. And again, because it doesn’t have those physical pieces on it, it’s not going to cover up as much stuff.
Yeah, but yes, speaking of physical pieces on boards, accidentally knocking things, losing, losing progress, losing game states this this can be anything from knocking the table to someone being kind of clumsy to your moving something and it goes, you know, I have lots of big witchy things with long sleeves. So I’m a I’m a chronic knocking things out of the way. But it can also be pets as well. It can be cats jumping on tables, it can be dogs, all that kind of stuff. So how like, let’s talk about some examples of games where we’ve got good and bad examples of components that are not accidentally easy to knock and some are.
Laura:
Yeah, I think like the obvious thing that comes to mind for me is any board game that has recessed indents that your pieces can sit in. There is a deluxe version, I think, of terraforming Mars where you have like recessed indent boards for tracking your various resources so that your cube stays in place because it’s in a cube shaped indent. I absolutely love that. Yeah. I think anything that can help to keep a piece in place really does help. I am that person that is clumsy in basically every way you’ve described possible in that list. And I really thrive on anything that can help me reset a nudged game state.
Cari:
I think Fort is a really great example. Again, we mentioned that before with their player boards, but they’ve got those recess spaces. They’ve got a couple different spaces as well. They’ve got one that’s like a stash, so you can have lots of tokens in there and they’ve got individual ones for things as well. And I think that was the first time that I’d ever experienced like a dual layer board like that. And I was immediately obsessed with it because it was just really good. Some other examples, they’re not great from a like from a mobility accessibility point of view in terms of set up, but like things like Mysterium and Obscurio where you’ve got these big boards where you’re putting in cards and yeah, like your clues and things, big mobility sort of cost to set it up, but from a, from a like being accidentally knocked POV they’re fantastic because it’s all just in this binder. Yeah, it’s all sorted and it’s, you know, you’re going to take a lot of effort to, to dislodge those. I want to take also a tiny interlude to talk about talk about knobs. This will make sense, I promise!
Laura:
You didn’t explain this in advance. You just put this will become clear.
Cari:
I’m like, yes, this will become clear. So specifically, I’m thinking about Betrayal. This was something that we found a lot with Betrayal where you’ve got these little, I can only describe them as knobs, little knobs that go on the edge of your character that mark like what your stats are.
Laura:
Oh, the pegs that clip on to the sides of your cards.
Cari:
Those are much better words to describe this. Yes, the pegs that clip onto the sides.
Laura:
They have an arrow that points at like the number around.
Cari:
Yes. Yes, exactly. And we’ve had a problem before where some of them have just been really loose. And so it just means that they’re not going to stay in place, and especially because there’s a lot of adjusting of those stats that you have to do, is your playing like you might knock it and it might be the another stat that you have- that you had has now changed and you now need to remember where that was. Or another example from El Grande is they have like a board punch board circle and you’ve got this arrow that you spin to like indicate a thing and you have to hide it initially and then reveal it. So there’s like a flipping over aspect as well. Yeah. And if those don’t have enough tension on them, they can get easily knocked as well. There’s also the inverse, too much tension being a problem for mobility.
Laura:
I was going to bring that up because, you know, I have the inverse problem with our copy of Betrayal Legacy has way too much tension on those little clips that you move. It makes them hard to slide or to remove and replace in place. Obviously it is a fine line to walk and only really rigorous testing of components before production will get you a good balance on that. I think there is potentially room for a designer to maybe include a less firm and a more firm clip. For example, in their components, if that’s not too much additional production to go, this one’s easier to move, if you struggle to move something hard. This one will definitely fucking stay in place If you put it there. Giving some, that might be a little extra components for something that might help that divide of needs.
But yeah, in terms of accidentally knocking things, this is not a component suggestion. This is an avoiding component suggestion. Once again, this is a really good benefit to something like the companion apps for like, Frosthaven, if you have an app tracking, you know, stats or those kind of bits of information, those are things I can’t accidentally knock over anymore and lose track of. An app is much more resilient to an accidental brush past than I am, and that can really help for anything that isn’t going to be reset-able easily.
Cari:
Absolutely. I think as well, like something if you’ve got punch board tokens already, can you provide things like if you are tracking your statistics or your level in something, can you provide tokens to say what level you are on, on that kind of stat? And instead of using the sort of clips, you can use those tokens instead. And even if you knock them, if you’ve got five of them in front of you and you’re knock them and something, you’ve got five spread out in front of you, you still know that that was level five. Like, are there alternates there that you can provide because you might have some extra punch board space. I’ve seen plenty of games that have extra little bits of punch board where they’ve put in like just nice pieces of art and stuff. So is there something you can do there to maybe address some of the potential barriers that you might have with some of your components?
Laura:
Indeed. Also, this is just like a this is still component focus, but this is just another thought I had for anything that requires you to tuck components under other components. I’m thinking something like, what’s the example I’m trying to think of… no it’s gone. Anything where you, for example, have to tuck cards underneath boards, for example, on certain sides of your board, have tiny little stoppers at the corners so that the board is slightly raised up so that I- there is already an inherent space for me to slide cards under. Anything where you have to, I have to slide something onto something else. If you can just lift up the top thing a little so I can slide things under easier. Such a relief!
Cari:
Absolutely. Otys is a nice example of that actually. This was a game that we got at a bring and buy and, but we have a slight problem with it. So with Otys you’ve got these, it’s a really nice dual-layer and on the top of it in the middle you’ve got recessed areas where some components are going to live. And on the outside you have areas for components to slide. But because we have a slightly older version, there’s warping that’s happened over time and now they’ve warped kind of upwards. So it now means that these boards are really easy to spin in like a circle. Like if you hit the corner of them, they just go! Like, so it’s really interesting looking at like things like that and see like how this holds up over time. And if it was like brand new, I’m sure it would be absolutely fantastic. Yeah, But yeah, we’ve had to look very carefully, try and like de-warp them.
One last thing that I want to say about components, because this is one of the big examples for me. Dice Forge really, I love this game. It’s fantastic. But the whole mechanic is you are changing the faces of the dice that you’re using and you have these nice little plastic like faces that you put in and there’s a lot of tension on them and they don’t provide any kind of tool for you to remove those faces. And we actually have like we have the Dice Forge spoon that we have put in the box and we use the spoon to dislodge the faces – a bit like those Lego,
Laura:
Like Lego spudgers, yeah.
Cari:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. But like it is one of the most mobility heavy games I know in terms of the fact that you’ve got these tiny little faces, you’re trying to put them in, there’s a lot of tension going on and there’s no tool provided but the whole gimmick. Gimmick? Sort of USP, sorry, I guess, of like changing the faces is fantastic. But like, please provide a tool like that to take those faces off. Don’t make me sacrifice a spoon to the box.
Laura:
Yeah. So we’ve talked a lot about, like the design elements of thinking about mobility and dexterity, accessibility, but this is probably a good point for us to talk about. Like some of the actions you might require of a player that will be inaccessible and thinking about like just being aware of these. So good place to start because this comes up in so many board games rolling lots of dice. That is a very specific movement that requires a lot more wrist dexterity than you might think about. That is something that, you know, you could potentially walk around with, say things like, I know players who have difficulty with lots of rolling motions will sometimes use things like dice towers as ways to roll that aren’t going to require that kind of motion. But that’s requiring something of a player outside of what you’ve provided them in the box. And it’s worth knowing rolling the dice is something necessarily repeatedly doable for people.
Cari:
Absolutely. I think like on the topic of Dice towers, I want to have a little bit of a Wingspan appreciation moment because they have this like bird feeder that you assemble. And initially I was like, this is such an unnecessary component and this brings me great, great, you know, this brings me great distaste because it’s just so clunky. But then actually thinking about it from a mobility perspective, it makes rolling those dice so much easier. It creates that little contained area where you know that they’re going to land and they’re not going to like knock things that are everywhere else. So yes, I’ve changed my mind on the bird feeder and I think it’s a really good thing to have included, particularly because those dice are very big as well. They’re chunky wooden dice. It is something that like they’re a little bit lighter, but yeah, having the bird feeder just kind of helps alleviate that barrier.
Laura:
Yeah, the dice rolling trays I think are an underappreciated accessory for board games. If you are someone who struggles with like I struggle with rolling dice, having my accuracy and strength be predictable, and if I’m rolling on a table, I will very frequently just absolutely roll off the table unintentionally having something with edges that I can roll against. Absolutely great. Having something like a dice tower where things are going to come out at a predictable trajectory of direction great for that, I’ve known board games that have included, say, a flat dice tray that you sort of pop together and raise the edges up on or like a little cardboard you assemble your own dice tower. Those do undoubtedly make it more accessible for me.
Cari:
Absolutely. I think like yeah, the- especially if you’ve got a game that’s taking up a lot of table space and then you now have to roll dice on top of that like we play games either on our little coffee table or on our big dining table. And that will be the thing where, oh, you know, Stardew Valley, it totally fits down on this little coffee table and then you need to roll the dice and you’re like, Where am I rolling these? Where it’s not going make anything now? So yeah, dice trays that are included I think is a really good thing.
In terms of rolling lots of dice. I want to talk about The Fox Experiment briefly. Really, really nice in terms of a lot of the designs, but you will fully end up rolling like ten plus dice near the end of the game and sure, you can roll them in batches. They’re big, heavy plastic dice and yeah, you can roll more than ten near the end depending on how you’re going. And it is just a lot. And that is an example of a game that doesn’t have something like a tray or a specific area for you to roll them into. But again, just the because they’re different from the wingspan dice in the form that they’re plastic and they’re just a lot heavier. And then also the amount of them and then also you might be rolling multiple times because you might be making multiple foxes. And so now all of this stacks up into quite a big barrier.
I think it would be cool to see more like very cute mini apps for games that are very dice heavy and just be like, this is a dice rolling app and you can just set what you need to and it will roll it for you and you can just have it on your phone and you can like have maybe a couple of other things there. I mean, that could be really great from a vision accessibility point, if there’s like screen reader, Screen reader, Yeah. Support in it, yeah.
Laura:
Yeah. Other stuff in in motion in games I’m going to bundle these two together said they’re pretty quick and similar flipping components over or picking up components – particularly cards – off a flat table. Now there’s a couple of things that can help with that in terms of picking up cards of a flat table, if you include plastic sleeves for your cards in your box, players who sleeve their cards have the edge that is open, that they’re inserting the card into the plastic sleeve is an inherently easier place to pick the card up from. It gives a little additional layer to get a grip on, but on top of that – the thickness of your component that needs picking up or flipping can make it easier. As well as thinking about where you place components that are going to need picking up or flipping because, let’s say you’ve got a board and cards that are going to need picking up are laid out near the edge of the board. That’s going to give a position where there’s going to be a gap to help lift them. Placing them near like a fold in the board can give a place with a slight purchase thinking about those elements of where can a player get purchased relevant to where we’ve placed these components can help make them easier to manipulate.
Cari:
Absolutely, I’ll talk about Flamecraft very briefly as an example. With this, you’ve got sort of like these enchantments that you do and they get laid out in the middle of the board, depending on what version you have. You either have like a punchboard board or, sorry, cardboard board or you have like a rolled mat board as well. But they’re in the middle and they’re also surrounded by the score track. So if you do need to slide it, you need to slide it in a way that you’re not going to accidentally knock someone else who’s on the score track. And then there are also all of these other smaller cards around the outside of the board where you’ve got dragons that are at shops. And so you need to like if you do need to sort of slide it, you need to find some way to maneuver it to be able to get to it and Flamecraft as well. As an example, talked a little bit about like flipping cards and picking them up and also talking them like tucking these enchantments under these bigger cards. It’s all the same thickness of card and where they are and the way that they’re laid on the table. It’s one of those like constant bugbears where it’s like, right now I need to pick up the entire shop and then I’ve got to pick up the dragons that are on that shop and I’ve got to tuck it under because I don’t want to, like, damage the edges of these cards. So yeah, so yeah, something like having, like you say, slightly different thicknesses would help a lot or considering sort of like do these things need to be tucked? Is there another way can work. I think for Flamecraft in particular it’s a table space thing of like if you don’t tuck them, they’re going to get pretty big, pretty fast. And they have made a lot of accommodations in terms of like making the cards sizes that are going to be the most tablespace friendly. But yes, lots of card manipulation in that game.
Laura:
Yeah. And you’ve got one last one on motion in games. You wanted to talk about Phantom Society and fitting pieces together?
Cari:
Yes. You talked a little bit about this with the Frosthaven maps, but so Phantom Society is a game. I don’t own it anymore, but I used to. And it’s about finding ghosts and. Some players are playing as ghosts and some people are playing ghost hunters. And the board is a couple of layers, a punch board, and you’ve got all these rooms and the ghosts, they have to lift the room up and then they’re circles where they need to put their ghosts into and they’re really, really tight fitting for one. So if you don’t get it perfectly flush, it’s going to be really obvious when the ghost hunters open their eyes where you are on the board. But also in terms of like that is a you’re picking up one piece and then you’re trying to fit this other piece. And part of me is sitting there wondering why they didn’t just make those recesses where the ghosts sit just slightly bigger because they don’t need to be flush. And also or potentially having like a little like tab as well, so that when you’re taking them back out again, like you’ve got that kind of purchase on it.
Laura:
So yeah, so last up as we sort of come toward the end of our hour, we want to talk about dexterity, mechanics. So some of these I think are going to be obvious so we can get those out of the way nice and quickly.
First, some games are built around specifically challenging dexterity as mechanics, and that’s inherently going to come with challenges, things like games that require you to stack a tower to avoid negative consequences, like, oh, something bad happened! Add something to the stack! Hope it doesn’t fall over is a classic example of that.
Cari:
Yeah, absolutely. Games like. Well, Jenga is the obvious one. Yeah, it’s games like Icarus, where it’s stacking dice, there’s Cactus and something called Tinderblox as well. I think like, yeah, again, this is an example of that’s the entire game and the dexterity is the mechanic. But is there a way that you can provide ways to make it easier or harder for some players to kind of balance that like, I’m pretty sure Tinderbox has like a set of tweezers available. And so it’s like, okay, well, is that going to make it easier or harder for some players? And can you try and provide a balance to the sort of dexterity level by having some players use those and having some players not? So I think that like looking at those kind of ways to help level the playing field is a really nice way to go: We know this is the main like barrier and this is the game, but this is how you can help to balance that so it’s not always the same people winning.
Laura:
Yeah, I think you could do something. For example, like let’s say if someone is confident with dexterity, they can use one set of components that are deliberately awkward shapes to stack versus someone who has dexterity issues might use a different set of components in the box that is more comfortably stackable shapes, to account for the fact that someone might struggle with that as a task. But still like what is challenging for them is going to be different to what’s challenging for someone else. That obviously requires additional components, but it is, I think, something worth considering as an option.
One thing that I’m really passionate about in dexterity conversations is are there ways to have options for low dexterity players to still take part without inherently being othered by design? And my favourite example of this is a game called Merchant’s Cove, where players are all fundamentally trying to do the same thing, create goods to sell at various docks. But the mechanics by which they do so differ player to player. And there are some of those that are going to be higher dexterity tasks than others. The one that I would say is probably the easiest to teach in Merchant’s Cove is making potions from this potion bottle by taking out coloured marbles, but that has some dexterity challenges associated with it. I have a friend who has some numbness in his fingers who really struggled with taking out one specific marble from position without disturbing the rest of that set up. But because that game has such drastically different mechanics player to player, next time he played, he played the blacksmith, who instead is placing dice into recessed holes on the board, which required a lot less manipulating spheres in tight spaces where other things need to drop into the space when it’s filled. Having something like that where you can recognize a person has a specific dexterity need and find a character role within the game that fits their dexterity needs. And it isn’t like; you’re playing it on easy mode. No, you’re playing the character that doesn’t have dexterity requirements, can really help to not feel like you’re having to go, well, here’s the easy mode set for you.
Cari:
Absolutely. I think this falls over a little bit with what we’re talking about with asymmetry in board games in the first episode. So like X-Com comes to mind for me because you’ve got like the commanding officer that’s doing a lot of the app management and that inherently has a lot less this dexterity to it than someone like the squad leader who’s moving minis on and off of the board. And even in competitive settings like Root, we talked about the fact that those characters play drastically differently. So again, like can you use asymmetry in the game to, like you say, provide different of dexterity to be able to allow other people to play?
Laura:
Yeah, other dexterity tasks that up in games is games that require writing or drawing. Did you want to talk about these a little bit?
Cari:
Yes, I have a lot of these. So things like Next Station and Railroad Ink – two sort of roll and write style train games that require drawing and writing on boards. There’s also Escape from Aliens in Outer Space. So some of them are dry wipe, which is good, but also comes with its own sort of mobility issues in terms of if you accidentally wipe it, it’s all gone. And then in terms of things like the, something like Next Station where you’re using different coloured pencils to be able to show where you’re going. Like there’s, there is just a lot of dexterity involved in writing. So are there ways or things that you can provide as a designer to make it, to provide options? I think again, it’s one of these examples where this will be a known barrier in the game, and if you don’t think that you can provide anything, that’s fine. But just try and be as transparent as possible that this will be something that is going to be required for the game. Because, yeah, I think for some of these, the only examples I can think of really is like just providing an online alternative to be able to play it.
Laura:
It’s either. Yeah, I think either that or one, one example I think about is for when having to draw or write on games. I think of something like Cartographers. For me the issue is the size of the thing is often too small for me to have the fine motor control to feel comfortable with having something like a PDF. Someone can print out their own version, but larger. Maybe laminated themselves, to go give me the digital file so I can make my own larger, more accessible equivalent I think would really help for a lot of stuff. Just having more space can really account for low dexterity in a lot of cases on those.
Cari:
Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a really, really good suggestion actually is like having it giving more agency to the players and being able to go. Actually, I need- I could do this, but I just need it bigger and things like that.
Laura:
I think overall as like a running theme for this series I think if more game designers thought about could I make a version of this available? So if someone has an accessibility need, they can come to my website, get some files, be it a 3D print file or a PDF image, that they can go away and make their own accessible components that fit their needs. I think that would be a really, really valuable step forward for like something to try and standardise across the industry is some degree of: If this game is inaccessible for you, here are the files that will help you to make an accessible adaptation to your play space.
Cari:
Absolutely. And, like those kind of files they don’t necessarily need to be, like, beautifully arted up or anything like that. It could be like, this is what we’ve made. We’ve got it on a kind of basic level here. And because board gaming has such a big community, if people do want to go away and make really gorgeous looking versions of these things, then they can do that, I think just like we appreciate board games, there’s a huge challenge in terms of like the production cost of games, like, yeah, every little thing that you add increases the production cost and then there’s a very sort of narrow margin there in terms of being able to get your profit margins from your games. So are there things that you can mock up or make very low cost that you can make available for players to download and use? Again, it’s this accommodations we’re talking about.
Laura:
Yeah, we’ve talked about that fact that like the big difference in board games and video games in terms of accessibility conversations is that you can’t offer lots of tweak-able settings with the board game. But if you order, if you offer some degree of files that other people can do the legwork on to create their own adapted versions, you allow some of that same flexibility that, say, settings of video games offers.
As we’re wrapping up, I think the last thing we had on the list, unless we think of anything else we want to say, is time constraints can be a factor in dexterity and mobility accessibility because sometimes a task a person might be perfectly capable of doing with no time pressure under time pressure, they cannot do, I think of like games like flatline for this where there is a lot of in a chaotic rush trying to communicate what dice you have and where they should go and how we should combine resources we have as a team. And that requires picking up dice, keeping them on the correct die face, comparing them to other people, getting them into position. That isn’t a game I would have dexterity challenges with until there’s time pressure. Sometimes adding time pressure can make a task become a dexterity challenge.
Cari:
Absolutely. And I think, like, again, we’re talking about X-Com, and that has the different timed elements to it. And there is that mobility level of like placing the squads onto the board or placing down like the resource, the researchers that you’re going to do and things like that. And when you’re already thinking, trying to think about what am I going to do? And now I also need to move this around and place these in different places, like with that time pressure, I think you mentioned it before in the first episode, but just providing alternatives to those time pressures or like providing accommodations? Be like, can you double the length of the timer if the timer is really necessary, or can you have a more chill version where there isn’t a timer? Yeah, and perhaps there’s something else that will bring in kind of that same agency, urgency. Sorry.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah. Just having that acknowledgment in the rules of, hey, we recognise time pressures can be a barrier for a lot of reasons and like giving the table an out to that I think goes a long way to making it feel okay to ask for that. Yeah, it’s like mobility isn’t something that I think a lot of people who don’t have mobility disabilities would think about time pressures being relevant to.
Cari:
No, exactly. I would agree with that. Like, yeah, like a lot of cases it can be like I, I can do this, it’s just going to take me longer to do this than it would some of the other people that I’m playing with. So being able to like adapt that. Like it would be really great if we’re thinking about our companion apps and stuff and if we know for like – sorry to say X-Com again, but you know, you’ve got different players in different roles. Can you put a setting per player where it’s like, let’s give this player like double time to be able to do their stuff so we can still engage in this timed mechanic but we’re just being able to be a bit more accommodating to people with different dexterity and mobility levels.
Laura:
Yeah, I think that’s about it for our amount of time that we’ve got today. Did you have anything else that’s jumping at your mind that you want to squeeze into today’s episode still?
Cari:
I don’t think so. I think the only thing that we didn’t mention, which is obviously very sort of basic with some board games, is physically moving pieces on a board and like, yeah, moving them from place to place. Sometimes the level of dexterity that is required to like specifically fit a thing into a specific area if there isn’t like a boundary. But again, I think that there’s a lot of similar rules that we’ve got rules, guidelines that we can say about the way that we’re approaching dexterity in general that can be applied to those kind of mechanics too.
Laura:
Definitely. Like, I think we if we had all the time in the world, there is other stuff we could probably address. But this is as much as I think we’re going to get wedged in for today, and if we think of anything urgent that like, Oh, we really should talk about that. Look forward to that sixth episode where we have a little bit of a grab bag.
Yeah, I think that is it for our second episode of Abletop! I hope everyone has enjoyed. We will be back next week with part three talking about visual accessibility. So all sorts of fun to do with text, clarity, iconography, colourblind considerations, things like, tactile gaming I look forward to that! We’ll have another of these for you next week!
Thank you very much, everyone, for watching. Goodbye!
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