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Abletop – Episode 4 – Cognitive Accessibility in Board Gaming

Laura Dale

Quick Points

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:28 – Transparency of Consequences

07:40 – Choice Overwhelm

13:13 – Game Complexity

20:05 – Game Length 

33:30 – Memory 

37:33 – Speed & Pacing

47:21 – Co-op & Asymmetry

52:40 – Content Warnings & Player Safety

58:25 – Outro

Transcript

Laura:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Abletop. It’s a six part mini series of videos talking about boardgame accessibility in various forms. This is our fourth episode. We’re going to be talking about cognitive accessibility today. I’m one of your hosts, Laura, I go by Laura K Buzz on various parts of the Internet, and I’m here as ever with my lovely co-host, Cari Watterton. Hi. Are you are you ready to talk about cognitive accessibility today? 

Cari:

Yes, I think so. 

Laura:

I’ve been looking forward to this one. This is this is one of my. I have a lot to say about cognitive stuff. I’m going to hit the ground running on this one. 

Cari:

Oh, fantastic. Awesome. You can even kick us off if you want.

Laura:

Sure. Cognitive accessibility is a really broad category, and there’s a lot of things that, like, arguably could be split up into other subcategories. I’ve had conversations with people about whether, like mental health and cognitive could do with being separated and whatnot. That’s probably a bigger conversation that we’re going to have today. But we’ll pick a bit of cognitive accessibility to start talking about. And as good a place to start as any is maybe to talk about cognitive overwhelm or the process of having too much cognitive load applied at one point where you are trying to either track too many things or process too many things at the same time, causing either stress or an inability to- just a sort of freezing response of being unable to process things.This can come in a lot of forms. One of the ones that I think is worth talking about is transparency of consequences. This can happen when you’ve got games that have permanent consequences that come up that players need to feel like they are in control of those elements of the game. I think of something like a lot of legacy games that involved tearing apart components, for example, will- can come across this particular area of cognitive overwhelm because if you are going to make that permanent of a change to your board game, that is a big barrier for a player who might stress about consequences of actions to overthink, do I have enough information to be confident that I am fully making this choice in an informed way? You could compare that to games that are maybe a little less permanent in their choice making, but still sort of come across this things like Frosthaven. That is a game that on the way to each of your individual missions, you will get these little along the road cards that give you a bit of context of a choice you’re going to have to make. I would argue those often deliberately don’t give you a lot of context. Like the way I would talk about those is those are choices where you go in sort of knowing that the game might be trying to mislead you and deliberately not give you enough context in making a choice. But that is a little bit balanced out by the fact that the consequences of those choices are generally smaller than they would be in something where like a legacy game, you’re tearing apart components.

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there with everything. Thinking about we played pandemic legacy quite a lot, and it’s really intimidating. Like putting the stickers on the board, changing things permanently, knowing if you’re going to lose something completely. And like, it’s not always. Yeah, it feels like a really heavy decision that you need to make. You need to consider like what is going to be the best step here. In terms of Frosthaven examples as well, like transparency and consequences. With those road events, quite often as players we will look at our little like flavour on our card and be like, What would my character do? Because we feel like we’re never given enough information to make that much of an informed decision because they can be very, very deceptive. It’s a little bit roleplay, kind of like, focus. But as you say, it’s smaller consequences. So it’s not quite so much. But I think that even if it was like having an opportunity to be like, if you want a hint or something like on the front of that card to help with people who might get more stressed or overwhelmed, and then that could be something that could help, particularly like transparency of consequences. Yeah, with the legacy games, it’s huge. And I think as much as possible that is going to be a component of legacy games is like those big permanent choices. And to help with that; being transparent on what things mean, being transparent if there’s possibility to have it reversed or changed or like we talked about before in episode one, having a couple of like sort of test runs of the game until you’re feeling a bit more confident and you’re you don’t have to make those permanent changes until you feel like, okay, I understand how this is going to work a bit more now.

Laura:

Yeah, I think pandemic legacy in its three iterations, Seasons one, two and zero is a good place to talk about, like transparency of consequences in that in pandemic legacy seasons one and two, there are points where you are making choices that will have long term impacts on that legacy game, whether you know it or not. You will be introduced new mechanics and you might later get penalised for choosing to use those mechanics. But because of the nature of how games work, you’re sort of primed to go; I’m given a mechanic, I should be using it. I- you don’t necessarily know at that moment; I’m making a choice that like a conscious choice that will have consequences that I should think about. Whereas if you compare that to season zero, that third season they released, Season Zero has narrative moments where it’s things like, Do you wish to reveal this information to your higher ups or are you going to keep that hidden? Those are moments that are much more transparent about this is a choice, meaning that you don’t feel like you’ve been forced into consequences you didn’t know about, and you’re less likely, I think, in season zero to overthink those choices quite so much. 

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. Like. Yeah, I think we’re just trying. Transparency, as we say, is just going to be the easiest thing in terms of just trying to help people make more informed decisions, even if it’s sort of like, okay, you want an experience where there are those hidden things is that you get this mechanic and you start using it and then you find out later the, Oh no, that wasn’t something that I should have been doing or I’ve been penalised for it. Even if you provided maybe like either an online or a guidebook, which is a bit more like if you want a bit more information, if you want a bit more awareness of the consequences of actions and feel a bit more comfortable with this, then that’s an optional resource that someone can use. Then it’s a way of preserving an experience that you would like for players that are into that, but also providing that support an alternative for someone who maybe needs a little bit more information to be able to make the game more approachable and less stressful for them. 

Laura:

Yeah, talking a little more small scale on cognitive overwhelm. The number of overall choices a player can be making on a turn can be a really big point of getting overwhelmed in gameplay. And I think this is a great opportunity to talk about one of my favourite worker placement games for managing cognitive overwhelm is a game called Apiary, where you’re sending little space bees off to do various jobs for the for the space colony. And I love that game specifically because there’s only six placement positions on the board, two of which are highly specific and situational. You can only go to them if you have a very high level worker in that moment to try to do something very specific. But on most turns of the game, you have four choices realistically that you’re going to. But then sub choices within those. So like one of my four places might be go purchase a new card to add to my ship, but they’ll be three rows and it’s like, Oh, do I want the row that’s working towards general carrying capacity, the one that gives me one time bonuses or that gives me bonuses every time I do something. So it’s like a smaller number of choices at any one time and sort of going down a flow chart. So you’re not thinking about all of the other sub choices over there right now because you’ve already narrowed in sort of where you’re going. I think that helps to really narrow down roughly which choice section you’re making and obviously not every game can work like this, but that sort of game is a good example of the kind of thing that that is going to reduce that kind of cognitive barrier.

Cari:

Absolutely. Whenever talking about like sort of cognitive load, one of the things that I always talk about is the laws of UX. There’s a website, there’s a deck of cards you can go and get and it handles a lot of different sort of like principles of user experience design. And there are things they’re like, how many things can people keep in working memory at one time? What is like choice overwhelm in terms of like what is kind of from a research perspective, how many choices can someone typically handle? But remember that reducing those is always something that’s good for approachability and for a wide range of people, like even people who are less game literate, people who are new to board games, or new to more complex board games. And I think that this is it’s obviously not something that can always be avoided in games, especially complicated ones, where it’s like having lots of complex actions is part of that. But are there variations that you can introduce into your game that reduce the number of actions? So like you can play a version where you’ve got key actions and then one or two things that you can do, and this extends over to goals as well. So a couple of examples. I’ve been playing a lot of recently are both Canvas and Verdant, and they have loads and loads of different goal cards, which will get you points at the end. And there are lots of opportunities to either omit some or all of the goals or choose goals that will go together to create a more aligned set of objectives and then that provides less choice in terms of things. We play canvas recently where we’ve been like just picking random ones and then we just end up with this spread of like, I can’t do everything and I’m getting really confused over where I should try and focus. So yeah, they’ve got for canvas in particular, they have scenarios that at the back of the book that you can use specific things for and they’ve got a really nice bit of guidance for each one. Like if you get an expansion, it goes this is a set of objectives you can use to experience more of the what the expansion has to offer, or this is a simpler one that has less goals out, or this is quite a balanced one. So things like that. And with Verdant as well, they have a lot of scenarios and lots of goal cards and you can play without them. And so like that’s an extra little thing that is a really nice thing to have in terms of providing variation for different groups because this can go both ways. You can have it where it’s reducing complexity and meaning that the cognitive load is a little bit easier, or you can go, okay, you’re going to have all of these goal cards and all of these different ways. And this is going to be a much more complicated game and then you’re more strategy-heavy players might be interested in doing that. 

Laura:

Yeah, and sometimes counterintuitively, giving a player an additional choice can simplify that cognitive load. And the example that I’m thinking of here is something like pandemic, where individual players will get dealt out a specific role card with a unique action at the start of each game and despite the fact that that’s giving players an additional thing to think about, they could be doing on their turn because that is something unique to them. It tends to lead players into going, This is my thing. I should be focusing on doing this when I’m able. It can make one choice feel a little easier to fall back on. And counterintuitively, make it so that an additional choice has made it feel like you have fewer choices you need to think about in a turn. 

Cari:

Exactly. It aligns you on a bit more of a direction of like what how to play and what route to take, which yeah, I think we talked a lot about that in the rules in the first episode that we did as well. But yeah, all of that I would agree with, like giving someone something that’s like you’re good at this can help them to feel less overwhelmed in terms of I don’t have to look at everything I can, I can focus, I can specialise and I can use these other basic actions to facilitate that. Yeah, absolutely. 

Laura:

Yeah, talking about rules a little more. Again, because obviously these things sometimes overlap a little bit. Talking about game complexity as an area of cognitive accessibility, one of the things I think is really, really, really important, where possible is thinking about rules consistency. Do your rules vary based on I don’t know, is it a different rule when you’re attacking an enemy versus when you’re defending in a battle? Are you playing by different rules depending on the era of the game that you’re in? Good examples of this are games like Oath, where your rules are pretty consistently changing between times that you play that game. It’s not necessarily a thing that you can’t do, but it is something you should be aware is going to be a barrier to people having to keep more things in memory at one time.

Cari:

Absolutely. We literally we played oath for the first time yesterday and the thing that caught me out quite a lot was the attacking and defending. So it’s different if you the attacker versus the defender. And it’s not always super clear when you take that attack action how many defence dice the person you are defending against is going to be rolling? That was one of the things that obviously it was our first game and it’s going to become smoother as we go. But it would be a case of cool, I want to attack that relic that you have and then suddenly there’s this bonus and that bonus and this other bonus that you’re having to sort of think about and go, okay, do I want to do that? And again, this feeds a little bit back into the consequences we’re talking about. It’s having the ability at the table to be like, if I attacked this, what how many defence dice would you be rolling? And we also got a little confused as to like our banners on our board and how they added things because it’s slightly different for attackers versus defenders. So there’s a really handy sheet that it has a reference sheet that you can go through that will explain those steps a bit more clearly. And that really, really helped us as we played. But yeah, there is that sort of clear calling out of this is different in these situations, this, this. 

Laura:

Yeah, yeah. Because I think the situation you want to try and avoid where possible with rules consistency is someone sitting when it’s not their turn and going; I know what I’m going to do on my turn, I know what I’m going to do on my turn. I’ve planned my turn out. I know how my turn is going to work out. Okay, I’ll declare my attack. For example. Oh, we’ve started doing the attack phase and I’ve realised that I got it the wrong way round. It’s the other way for me attacking. I now don’t want to be doing this. I’m realising this doesn’t work how I thought it did. And I’ve made a suboptimal play and I’m about to screw myself over. That’s not a good feeling to have that moment of embarrassment at the table of, do I admit; I’m really sorry I’ve started attacking and I’ve seen your dice versus mine and realised I completely misunderstood how this was going to work. That’s a really stressful feeling to have at the table with a game. And it is something that is inevitably going to be more of a problem when you have rules that are if then; but if then. 

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. I think something else as well in terms of the rules, complexity is the ability of players like sniping your plans. So have they taken a card that you were planning on taking? Have they filled up a location space that you were going to use? Is there is the game something where you’re going to be expected to pivot quickly or have alternatives and plans? Because yeah, there’s there are games you can play and you can sit there and you can watch the round go round and when it gets to your turn, you can plan what it is that you want to do. And when it gets back to your turn, it’s very unlikely that anything would have changed in terms of, okay, yes, I’m thinking about like when Wingspan, for example, there’s not a lot of stuff that happens between turns. So you can spend that time thinking about what you want to do. But in something like Oath, you don’t necessarily have the ability to be planning your turn in advance too much because things are constantly changing. You might be wanting to like attack that relic there, but now this person’s taken it. And does that change things? 

Laura:

Yeah, I think this is one of those things where if your game has say, more positions on the board to be going to, if it’s like a worker placement or your tableau of cards to be selecting to add to your hand is a large tableau, you can a little more safely have the ability to plan your next turns in advance because the percentage chance of the thing you’re going for being taken before it comes back around to you is less when you’re playing something like, you know, seven wonders where the number of like active choices of cards to take in that moment is fairly small. It does force you to do that pivot more frequently because you cannot take your time to preplan while it’s not your turn. And if you need a second to cognitively process, that’s going to inevitably lead to a more stop start game flow. If you’re having to wait until your turn starts to be able to get doing that process.

Cari:

Exactly. And I think like Tokaido and Namiji are good examples of this as well, where you have limited spaces on the board you can travel to and it will be a case of quite often someone will go where you plan to go and now you’re kind of having to change your strategy up as you’re kind of playing. And it’s sometimes difficult, particularly with those games, to do everything and you want to try and pick a focus. But yeah, I think the stop start stuff we could pivot into like speed and pacing here if you wanted to? 

Laura:

Possibly? I did have one quick thing I wanted to say on that just while I was thinking about it, which was I’m struggling to think of a good example of games that do this off the top of my head, but I know it’s a mechanic that exists. Is, let’s say, worker placement as a genre. Having a like trump card unit, you know, in your worker that say, Hey, even if someone’s already gone into that space you needed to go, you can send this big worker and they can still go there even though it’s occupied, having some ability, even like once per round to go, even though that thing I needed is taken, I have one chance to still do it anyway. To keep myself on track can really help. 

Cari:

I think! I think tiny epic dinosaurs has that I haven’t- 

Laura:

Possibly. Yeah. There’s a game I’m thinking of that’s about running a vineyard over multiple seasons that I’m struggling to remember the name of. But I. 

Cari:

Yes, I know exactly the game that you’re talking about. I’ve forgotten the name of it as well.

Laura:

I’m sure someone will have it in the comments or I’ll remember to put it in the description. But yeah, as you were saying, we move on to that a game length discussion? Yeah. 

Cari:

Yes. So I mean yeah. In terms of game length it can be a barrier. I always find that the play times on boxes are a massive lie especially.

Laura:

Oh absolutely. 

Cari:

Yeah. Like you need to have a “How long does it take to learn and play this game for the first time”, especially for new players. Because it is a thing where it is going to take you longer to learn the game and unless it’s something where you’re playing it really regularly with people who are really familiar, I find it very difficult to match those kind of estimations of the time that they have on the boxes. So I think it would be really cool to have a bit more of a this is how long it takes. And then plus this amount of time for learning the first time, which can really, really help because that’s a big thing for complexity. And you know, we have board game evenings and we’re like, okay, what kind of game do we want to play? How long is it going to take us to learn this? I mean, speaking on Oath, first time playing it yesterday, I think I think it actually took us about 4, 4-5 hours to play our first game, which was wild. It was a lot longer than I thought it would be. And we went through the sort of example turn round one that we did as well, which was really helpful. But there was some reference in that rule book of sort of saying like, this first game is going to take a little bit longer. When you get used to this, you can do it within like usually within about 2 hours you can get through a game, which is sort of like a nice piece of information to have. But yeah. Did you have any thoughts? 

Laura:

Yeah. On game length, I think it’s worth thinking about the fact that it’s not always overall game length. That is the only accessibility barrier cognitive wise to game length. I think it’s also worth thinking about what is your like individual turn length? What is your pacing of a round? But also elements like, how likely are you to have every player at the table need to be engaged in the game at all times? Is yours a game where during all the players turns, you know, am I going to be sat going, I can’t really- Nothing that my opponents do is moment to moment going to have an impact on me, really. It’s not worth to be paying attention until it comes back to me. And I look at the new board state and make my own decisions. Is it a place where like, moment to moment it’s going to be mentally engaging, to keep up to- up to track with other people’s turns? For example, I think there’s a really big difference in the cognitive barriers present in, say, a co-operative game of a very high length versus a competitive one. A co-operative one; you’re going to be constantly in conversation, constantly engaged. Sure, that’s going to require being more focused for a longer period of time, but it is going to mean there’s fewer opportunities for you to accidentally zone out and not be paying attention to what’s going on and have to catch back up with the game state. And I think that’s all part of that conversation is working out are there points in this game flow where someone at the table prone to distraction might get distracted. Or are you requiring someone to be constantly engaged for that amount of time? Because both of those I think are different cognitive barriers. 

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I think as well on the note of like a longer co-operative game, one of the benefits is that you can rely on your fellow players to help. With, like, you don’t necessarily need to remember everything that’s going on. You don’t necessarily need to be aware of all of the intricacies of the rules. If you’re playing it as co-operative experience and someone could be like; It’s okay, like, I- this is going to have this consequence and I understand how that works. And then that can break down that barrier and make it a bit more approachable as well. But yeah, I tend to think about like are- when we play Frosthaven, I genuinely find that I play better If I am sat with my sketchbook just drawing at the same time because there is so much down time in terms of like going through everybody else’s turns. And usually because we played it for a while now, like I am quite quick to pick what my cards are going to be for my next turn and I’ll pick them as soon as my turn is- as soon as I’ve gone. Cool. This is the number for this round. I’ll pick the next cards that I want to play and I can swap those out if I need to. But then it’s just it that’s done. And then if there’s something drastic that changes on the board, I can adapt or I can pivot slightly, but at least I have an idea of what it is that I want to do. But it is one of those where it can take much longer because there may be really complex actions that the enemies are doing. There may be really complex turns that other people are doing where they’re able to do more things or less things or make different decisions depending on the complexities of character. And it can be one of those things where it takes a while to get back round to you. And so yeah, I found that like I need to do something to stay actually more engaged.

Laura:

Yeah. And I don’t know if this is something that could be considered on the design of a game, but I think for something like Frosthaven as an example, one thing that I think is maybe a good idea for keeping people at the table engaged when not on their turn is splitting up some of the many game master elements of running a Frosthaven session between players and not just having one person be responsible for everything means that say, Hey, one person at the table, one player is managing the order of attackers and is going, okay, what’s everyone’s numbers? What are the enemy numbers? Okay, I’ve got everyone’s little tokens in order this person’s turn has finished. Oh, it’s your turn now. Someone else is taking control of the enemy cards and the enemy modifiers. Someone else is managing, moving the monsters around the board or whatever, so that everyone has some little job. That’s like, it’s something that’s keeping me remembering where we’re at in turn order. Even if there’s still enough downtime in that round for, as you say, like having a sketch book out or something I think can really help. 

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I think other examples of games, I mentioned it before, like Wingspan, where there’s not a lot of interaction between players, between turns. There’s only like one specific, like type of activity that goes once between turns. You can do this thing. And in comparison to something like Earth, there all players act each turn, depending on what action the person whose turn it is picks, and that changes the pacing of that as a game differently. Like I love Earth because I always feel like I’m doing something and I never feel like there’s too much just nothingness where I can plan what I’m going to do on my turn, and then my mind starts to wander. And then I come back to I go, What was I thinking? What’s going on? So yeah, but I think yeah, I think the what you’re saying there about if it’s a co-operative game or even if it’s a combative game, if there are different elements that you can kind of use to engage players if they would like to, if that’s something that they would be comfortable with and would find helpful. But yeah, I- found honestly having my sketchbook out and sketching is just something that I do and then I am much more ‘on it’ in terms of like cool, it’s my turn. This is what I’m going to do. This is how this is working. Yeah, which seems really counterintuitive, but I think from a table perspective, being accommodating for that because yeah, my game, my people that I play it with are lovely but I do constantly get accused of being like, oh, ‘Cari is knitting, stop knitting.’ And this comes from when we were playing Divinity and I would sit and crochet whilst in between turns because people take a long time and then it would get to my turn. And it’s not always super in your face that it has become your turn. And then so I would get people down the mic saying, ‘Stop knitting, it’s your turn.’ But I think it’s a very affectionate joke. But being accommodating, if people do want to like have a sketch book out, have a little sketch of something, be doing a little puzzle on the side or something like, maybe that’s the way that they best focus and just being accepting of like. This is something they’re not being rude. They’re not like trying to disengage.

Laura:

Yeah. 

Cari:

It’s just how they can help best play and contribute and not feel like they’re being a pain. So yeah. 

Laura:

Definitely. I think last point on game length and this is like something generally I think is really important for any kind of game design, making sure you have the ability to have pause points or like exit ramps where you could have a moment to go. We can leave the game state here and it will be clear what was going on and easy to come back into or if breaks need to be taken. Having some clear and obvious place where that isn’t going to be hugely detrimental to the flow of the game. 

Cari:

Absolutely. And like this can happen in both like a like a legacy game is where you might think of it typically something like Stuffed Fables I found to be very drop-in drop-out. It’s a very approachable legacy game, I think built specifically to like have families play with their sort of younger kids as well. But it’s very much sort of like you can, the sessions, the pages that you do a very short and you can stop between any one of them or there’s something like Jaws where the board is flipping halfway through. And that’s where a point where you can take a break and you can come back to it another day or something. 

Laura:

Yeah, something like Brass Birmingham going between the two eras being a really good convenient point. If you need to take a little break there because a lot of the game stages resetting. 

Cari:

Exactly. Or even games that have rounds and where you’ve got like the person who’s like this is the person leading the round. Can it be that you get to the end of the round, you can take a photo of the game state as it is and then you can be like, either maybe; I can break and we can go and have dinner or like actually we’re going to pack up here and we’re going to come back to this a little bit later. Like, Yeah, yeah. I think that there are ways there where it would be really helpful in rulebooks for longer games, thinking like, you know, up to an hour or something like that or more where you go, these are convenient points where you could take a pause, take a photo of what’s going on, and there’s not going to be too much to set this up again.

Laura:

Yeah, I think I think as well, like the ability to- Sleeping Gods, I think is one that’s kind of like this where if you need to have a pause point, you can take a photo of like your current things, put them all in one little plastic bag and go; everything for exactly my current character state is in one place so I can put it away and get it back out. Because so often pausing in a game sort of is built around the idea that you have a space that you can leave committed to that game undisturbed, that you’re not going to have pets, you’re not going to have anything disrupting it while you leave it. And the ability to put your element, your game units away in a way that records your current game state but is easy to get back out can make it a lot more approachable to take a pause mid-game. 

Cari:

100%, like I’ve also played quite a lot of Sleeping Gods and I loved the fact that like, yeah, each character has a bag, you put the stuff in it, you know that that’s going to be it’s going to be a much more approachable for you to come back to it and be like, Cool. I know the exact status that my character was in. It’s saving the game. It’s basically saving games for board games. But as you say, like are there ways that it can be done where you don’t have to keep it out? Where it’s like, actually, you know, we’ve started playing this, I’m really overwhelmed, but I really don’t want anybody to like, miss out on what they’ve built up so far. Can we save this, put it away, bring out something easier to play, and then we can come back to this either later or another time. 

Laura:

Yeah. Is there a good strategy by which I could organise these things so that I can quickly put them away and quickly get them back out and have all of my. This was in my discard pile. This was in my hand, this was this, this was that be clearly reproducible. 

Cari:

100%. And like, yeah, we’re talking about this from a cognitive accessibility perspective, but this is also just helpful for like mobility accessibility that we talked about before. If some, if it is a lot, if someone’s getting tired, if they’re getting sort of fatigued, then having those points is also really helpful for them. Being like this can enable someone to play a more complex game that has a lot more motion in it. Otherwise that they would- they wouldn’t be able to play in one session. So yeah, absolutely. 

Laura:

Exactly. So other elements of cognitive accessibility, this one we can probably touch on fairly, fairly quickly. Memory is definitely an aspect of cognitive accessibility and as we’ve said in previous episodes, we’ll say it here again, if memory is a deliberate barrier in your game, then sure, great. We understand that that’s a thing sometimes, but be aware that it is a barrier and be aware of the barrier that you are creating and not doing so unintentionally. Sometimes games will require this card has been revealed and we’re going to put it back face down. You have to remember for later. Oh, I get to pick one of those cards. I know the one I want. Where was it again? Maybe that’s in the realm of; you put a card face down and it got shuffled around and you’re trying to keep an eye on it and then have to remember where it is. Those are barriers that are going to impact some people more than others. And it’s about thinking all the variations you can provide that can help accommodate around that.

Cari:

Absolutely. Like, yeah, this goes it stretches all the way from like, is your game 100% memory based? Something like Hanabi, which is a really nice example of like a co-op card information game. Or is it something where there is a couple of elements in your game which are based on memory? So I think about some of the goals in Fort are specifically, like, hidden and you pick them up as you see them and you take which ones. And that kind of means that the people who pick up them up later have not seen all of the goals that were available. So they don’t necessarily see what other people have done, but something like that. It’s such a small thing. If you could just have actually, if this is going to be a barrier to you, you can play with those revealed and then it’s not going to have a massive impact on the game. Like, yeah, having little accommodations where this is the way that we’ve designed it to play. If this is going to be a barrier to you, this is a way that you can play it differently. Like, thinking about Hanabi, I wonder if there might be some kind of variation where you have a group of people and everybody have their cards, so you have your hand of cards and they face everybody else. So the idea is that you don’t know what you have and then you are getting clues as to what you have in your hand and you can see what everybody else has. So you’re kind of giving them some guidance. I’m thinking with Hanabi, is there a version of that where someone with- someone who might struggle with memory would be able to turn round some of the cards to face them so that they know what they are and they don’t have to remember? Or are there other things that they can do to help? To help sort of like remember? Okay, yes, I was given this clue about this thing. I mean, part of that game is you give clues and they’re deliberately sort of like one piece of information or the other, like a number or a colour. And some of the fun of the game is like telling people you have this card in your hand and then they forget it because you can ask people, what do you know about your hand as you get round? And like that is a nice, fun part of the game. But if that is going to be a barrier, that’s going to mean someone is really not comfortable or confident playing the game. Yeah. What are those kind of accommodations that you can do to make it? 

Laura:

Yeah, I feel like sometimes the accommodation is just make it okay for someone to take notes.

Cari:

Yeah. Yeah. 

Laura:

You know, sometimes it’s just I kind of hold that many things in my head at once. I’m going to have a better time if I can keep a reference that I can occasionally glance at for some of this. Yeah.

Cari:

Because nobody wants to feel like I’m almost feel dumb. There’s like a couple of different card games that we play with my parents and like, my dad’s getting on a bit and he’s not always able to keep the things in his head that he needs to keep in his head. And it can be I think I will feel bad because I’ll feel like I don’t know if he’s having a good time because I wonder if he’s feeling like he’s not on the same level as everybody else and is something that we can be like, that’s fine. Like you can look at these cards if you need to. You don’t need to worry about sticking to the rules exactly. 

Laura:

Yeah. 

Cari:

So, yep, I agree. Like taking notes or just being able to like take reference of information that you have been given if it’s a memory game. 

Laura:

Definitely. So we’ve got so much to talk about on this cognitive one. So we’re going to we’re going to keep this moving, keep it moving.

Speed and pacing. We talked about a little a little bit about some of this earlier. We talked about turn pacing. Are there lengthy bits of periods of time where you’re not meaningfully interacting when it’s not your turn? Other elements of speed and pacing round pressure is a big one. This is not the same as time pressure that we talked about before necessarily, where there is like a strict here’s an egg timer, we turn the same timer over, here’s how long you have. Round pressure can be more in the sense of you only have a set number of rounds to complete an objective or gain a resource. And I think of this with something like the Stardew Valley Board game where maybe an objective is you have to have collected X number of this autumn resource before Autumn’s gone and where you have this present ticking clock and you might have this sort of cognitive pressure of every turn has to not be wasted because I’m feeling pressured by this approaching deadline.

Cari:

Absolutely. The Stardew Valley Board game is a fantastic example of that and like you’re revealing the bundles and it costs you resources to reveal those bundles until you’ve played the game like once or twice, you might not necessarily know that like the ones in like the craft room or the pantry are going to be season sensitive so, or might be season sensitive. So it’s a good idea to like, reveal those first. Like it’d be great to have a little like reference on the board there just to say if you’re stuck – pick one of these because this might be helpful to know now. 

Laura:

Yeah, because you might turn that over and find out it’s spring and have slightly shot yourself in the foot because it’s already summer. 

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. And there is the capability to change those goals. But again, it costs more resources. So, other kind of games like this that I think about are Ancient Knowledge where you’ve got your playing cards and they go on a timeline and every like the end of your turn, you move those cards down the timeline and eventually they, they end up in a discard pile. So you’ve only got so many turns to make use of them. Or something like Fungi, which is a little mushroom collecting game. And the idea is that you’re walking through the forest. So this, this kind of track of cards is constantly sort of like moving and becoming a discard pile. And there are things that you are going to like lose the ability to gain. So those kind of counting down tracks can present that kind of round pressure, as you say, not the same as time pressure. It’s just I need to do this many things and again, this can lead to cognitive overwhelm where you’ve got oh, gosh, I have like these several goals to get within this amount of time. You’re kind of trying to keep track of what you need to do. 

Laura:

It can lead to feeling like you need to be planning multiple steps ahead in a way that can be difficult. It limits your ability to make turn to turn decisions because it feels like there is so much pressure for this turn to lead you well into next turn, to lead you well into the turn after. 

Cari:

And I think that like there’s things that can be done again for something like Fungi. It’s quite a it’s a very chill little game. It’s a little bit less stressful as opposed to something like Ancient Knowledge where there’s a bit more complexity to the cards that you’re doing. But even just having like a little like if you’re not sure, like welcome back to the game or welcome to your first game or something like that, where it’s this is these are good mushrooms to pick up because there’s loads of them and you don’t need to stress too much if they’re going to go beyond here or, or things like this specific type of building in Ancient Knowledge is going to be particularly helpful for not giving you too many things to try and think about getting to the end of realms and- getting to the end of the rounds and getting discarded. So this could be a good route to take. Just a little bit a guidance to players to give them the feeling of like what is going to reduce that pressure between rounds and between choices. I think it’s just a good thing that could be awesome to have and more games like that. 

Laura:

Definitely, going back to Frosthaven – and I know we bring Frosthaven up so frequently – but it’s such a good example of barriers that can come up in games. 

Admin time for a game can be a really big cognitive barrier to getting to the table be that either a set up and tear down time of the game itself or the amount of time involved and effort involved in resetting between rounds and phases. Frosthaven is one of those examples of a game that like, the number of things you’re having to set up before you can even start playing off. Has everyone got their individual player board and their player decks and their little figurines? Okay, Have we worked out what mission we’re going to next and do we remember what things on the flow chart, what these missions actually represent in real terms? Then get out the boards for that mission and the little components that have to go on the board and the enemy types on the enemy decks for that mission. And we’ve got to make sure that we’ve done the road event on the way to that mission. Then we’ve read out the text that sets up the mission then we’ve checked the level of our current players so we know what level to set the difficulty of the mission to. All of these the things that happened before you ever start playing and, Frosthaven I like as an example because there are ways you can reduce some of that that set up complexity. We talked in one of the other episodes about the fact that my wife recently picked up the books for Frosthaven so that you can just open the books onto certain pages and you’ve got a map already set up rather than having to find the map tiles, set them up on the table, find the little components to place on all the hexes. You can just open up the page, lay it out on the table, and that’s done. Sometimes those kind of additional options not only make it like physically easier to set up a game, but also make it that there is less of a cognitive barrier because there are fewer steps to getting it, to getting it to the table in the first place.

Cari:

100%. Yes. Yeah. We talk about Frosthaven a lot, but like you say, it’s such a good example of so many things and it has a lot of examples of how to reduce those barriers as well. But when we play it, we have my partners basically in charge of setting it up. So usually like he will set up before people arrive and we will have decided what mission we’re going to do at the end of our previous session. So that avoids a step. Either that or it will be like we trust each other enough that we’re going to pick something that will be helpful to do. One of the things that we did as well, you’re supposed to do the town phase in Frosthaven. At the end of the session. We found that we hate doing it that way because we play through the thing and we get really fatigued and then we’re like, and now we have to do this big admin phase and it’s just really dull. So we have like, frontloaded that. 

Laura:

I really like that suggestion. I might- because my wife’s the one who sets up Frosthaven whenever we play, she’s our sort of game organiser and we found the same thing with Frosthaven is we get to the end of a big mission, particularly if we’ve done like more than one mission in a day. We’ve done two or three missions and we’re like, okay, that’s the last mission of today. We’re all kind of ready. You’ll find that like everyone at the table is packing up their character and thinking about like getting unwound on the sofa. Everyone is like ready to be done and almost starts drifting away from the table before that admin phase of coming back to town happens. And I think that town phase is not as immediately gameplay engaging and requires focus and like it’s admin. I feel like that is something that’s easier to get cognitive focus on from a group of neurodivergent people at the start when everyone still has energy. Then at the end, when the exciting moment to moment is finished. That’s a really good point. I might suggest that for our group. 

Cari:

Yeah, it’s been really helpful. Like there’s a couple of things where we have a book now that we put in if there’s anything that we need to take note of for the next time. But there are a couple of things where it’s beneficial. Like for example, the temple, where you can get blesses. Like if you’re frontloading that, then you can just put them in the deck because you’re going along or things like the challenges for the town guard as well. Like you can get those before the session starts. So I think there’s a little bit of flexibility there, but it’s really helped us because, yeah, we had that exact problem. We’d get to the end of it and be like, No, we’re exhausted now. Like we want to chill, we want to go have dinner or something like that. But yeah, so I think that that kind of flexibility is really helpful. And again, it’s thinking about this is a different phase of the game that has different levels of engagement. How can you best structure that with your group? 

Laura:

Yeah, but again, like Frosthaven is one that suggests doing it at the end. That’s how it tells you to do it. But as a designer, thinking about; what amount of focus is this going to require from players and how engaging is it? And where to suggest players place that in their amount of focus they have for the day? You know, that is maybe something where someone else designing a game like Frosthaven might go. Maybe we tell players to do it at the start because we recognise that’s somewhere where players might have more focus to get it done, that is something you can definitely consider is as a designer, I think. 

Cari:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think like when you first play it because you do like a scenario and then it introduces the town phase afterwards, it makes sense from a tutorial perspective there that it’s coming after the first time that you’ve gone to gameplay, but it doesn’t mean it has to stay that way going forward. Just find what works for it for you and your group should we move on to some of the other topics? Because we’re- there’s so much to cover. 

Laura:

Yeah we’ve got about, we’ve got a little over 10 minutes left of today. So let’s move on to co-op and asymmetry. So this is similar to something we touched on earlier. We talked about sometimes rules will be different when you were attacking versus defending, but sometimes we’re dealing with bigger asymmetry of rules such as games, like Root where different players have different characters with different rule sets, or something like betrayal Legacy, where someone has to go away mid-game and learn a secret secondary ruleset to have to keep secret, and therefore they can’t get help from other players at the table. These are two examples that function in kind of different ways but sort of get at the same problem. Root is a difficult teach for a new group of people because you cannot just go, here is how the game works and that is the one teach you have to do a teach for one person, do a different teach for someone else, then teach how you might want to play against that other kind of rule set and how to think about the game differently from each other. If you’re playing, say, a four player game, there are going to be four different rule sets competing for different things that you need to play differently against in order to counter. That’s all stuff that at least is open information, but it does increase like the burden of a teach and put an increased barrier on understanding what other people are doing and how you interact with that. I think betrayal legacy is the bigger example of this is a as a cognitive barrier, because that is a game that, as I said, you have to go away and learn a second rules set by yourself. You don’t know who at the table is going to have to go learn that second rule set, and you have to be confident that they are someone who can internalise and memorise and understand a new set of rules under pressure and then execute it without other people to cross-reference and confirm with. And that is a lot of pressure to put on someone to quickly learn a new rule set that differs from everyone else and not get any help with making sure they’ve understood it correctly on the first try. 

Cari:

100%. In the sake of brevity, we talked a lot about this in the first episode and there are timestamps on it, so I recommend that you go and see what we talked about there. But asymmetry going down to smaller things, like the asymmetry of different players actions we talked about before, how it can be helpful in something like pandemic because it gives people direction. But I think it’s just something to think about. Like if you have asymmetric characters, how is that going to affect the players? Got some feedback as well. Would it be helpful to have a set of rules where players have completely symmetrical actions? And then that way you can not only are you, like, learning by playing your turns, but you’re learning by watching everybody else’s turns as well. Like, I think that’s one of the biggest for me with Root is that I can’t learn how to play my character by watching everybody else. I can only learn to play my character by playing my character. So yeah, if there’s if there are extra little things that you can do or variations on components where you can be like, here’s a little bit of asymmetry that we’ve introduced, but it can either be taken out for this particular variation game or it can be changed to these more standard actions that everybody has access to. Something like that could be really cool in terms of- oh sorry go for it! 

Laura:

Oh, sorry. I think Root again is a really good example because like it’s an example that really highlights how important it is to specify sometimes your phase of a certain name will really different from someone else’s phase of a certain name. Just because it’s on your like on your Daybreak phase, this sort of thing happens doesn’t mean that Daybreak means the same for someone else. And it’s really important to hammer that home because it can be really easy to hear someone else at the table go, oh, it’s Daybreak, and do something and get in your head. Oh, they did that on Daybreak. Am I supposed to be doing that on Daybreak? Nope. Your Daybreak phase is a completely different thing, particularly if something like Root, you are using shared language for phases; really highlight to players. Just because that rule exists for them, when we use this terminology, doesn’t mean that applies to you. 

Cari:

Yeah, that’s a fantastic point. Talking very quickly as well on cooperative versus competitive. We mentioned this before. Cooperative makes it easier to ask for clarifications or to lean on your other players for help in terms of things like keeping track of the board state or keeping track of consequences. And even when there isn’t and it gives of competitive is difficult and it is difficult even if there isn’t hidden information that you’re keeping from other players, just kind of due to not worrying that you be giving something away. If you’re asking questions like; what would happen if I did this or what would happen if I did that? So is there a version of your game where you can play it in teams and then you can have like someone there supporting you or we talked before and the rules thing about the sort of no consequence first competitive game where it’s like we’re not we’re not playing for points, we’re just playing to get to get used to the these scenarios. But again, you can look at the first episode for kind of more detail on that. 

Laura:

Yep. And then the last major section we want to get in, I think on this cognitive episode is talking about content warnings and player safety. I want to talk about one of my favourite examples of this being done well in a game, is a game called Alice is Missing. This is a game that is played entirely by doing a group text message chain on your phones. No talking out loud. You tell a story over 90 minutes about a missing person called Alice that all of the players playing the game have some preexisting relationship to. And over time, you’re revealing cards that will introduce suspects and locations to the narrative and ultimately will reveal what has happened to Alice. That game sets up its themes in advance. It has a lot of stuff in the rulebook about like these are potential things that could come up. These are potential things that the cards might introduced to the game. Here are tools for taking some of those plot elements off the table in advance. So if there are things in the game’s provided deck of prompt that you do not want to be fates that might have happened to Alice, you can you can remove those in advance. It has tools for stopping the story in real time to assess comfort with topics. Be that things like having a tangible card you can just put on the table and go. We step out of the role play for a minute. We can wind that back if something, if a player has brought something into the game that we’re not comfortable with. I think it does a really good job of balancing in advance, make it, trying to make sure that things that are going to be uncomfortable to the table are taken off the table. But recognising even if we take the things out of the game pile and discuss as a group, things we can foresee will be problems. Not assuming that that means all problems will be caught and that sometimes you won’t know a thing will be a problem until it crops up in game and making sure there are tools in place to go. I didn’t know this was a problem in advance, but it is. We need to we need to work around that. 

Cari:

Absolutely. That’s fantastic. And there is a lot of similarities in, like, role playing games, like safety tools that exist, there’s quite a lot of really good ones like the X card and stuff like that that can be looked at are available and that’s again for assessing player comfort with things, providing ways for people to stop or completely just move away from things. And I find that’s really helpful. But there’s been a couple of examples I’ve come across as well. Like Dead of Winter, not so much heavy on the roleplaying side, but there are cards that have some content which could be quite difficult and they have specific icons on those cards to be like, you can take these out of the game or like we’ve usually had it before where we’ve drawn it. The person who’s drawing it has had a quick skim of it and then gone. Nope, don’t want to, don’t want to read that while we’re going to pick, we’re going to pick another one instead. Yeah. So like that kind of thing as well. And just having the transparency of these are the things that may crop up. These are ways that you can sort of build this game so it’s going to be a comfortable experience for everybody because like, yeah, again, you’re sharing this experience, you’re playing games with people, you want to have fun, you don’t want people to be uncomfortable. And I think it’s really should be normalised in terms of asking people; What are topics that you don’t want to come up? And you can try and even just being transparent about that as like the person who suggested the game, whether it’s whether something like Alice is Missing, whether it’s something else, I’m like, I think it’s something that video games has done quite well with some trigger warnings and content warnings and things like that. But with board games, there’s a little bit more of like the players have to communicate to each other and it has to be a good environment and it has to be a case of being able to feel like you can say, I’m not comfortable with this and have it be omitted without sort of any kind of judgment or anything where anybody is going to sort of, take offense, like… 

Laura:

Yeah. 

Cari:

So yeah, I think having an awareness of that being as upfront as Alice is Missing is where it’s like really making sure that the table that has this knows the responsibility that they should be taking is really, really important for those kinds of games.

Laura:

Yeah, I think the reason I like Alice is Missing so much is it’s tone in the rule book is like, this is not an optional thing. This is part of setting up the game as we go through this. And it is a there is no judgment. It is you are not doing anything wrong. If you engage with these mechanics, you’re not doing a lesser version of the game. You are engaging with the game correctly. You are being conscious of the emotionally heavy topics involved and taking them seriously. That is you respecting the game and it is very key that that that is what you how you should be treating the game. That is not you doing something wrong. And I really appreciate that kind of approach.

Cari:

Absolutely. And I think like, yeah, if there could be more transparency on game boxes as well just to kind of be yeah, there are some topics in this that might come up and they can be omitted or they can’t be committed is a really big important thing that’s going to be able to help somebody make an informed decision of whether or not they are going to pick up that game. But yes, 100% making it part of that experience, not making it like an optional thing or that you’re doing it differently, just making it part of that is the way that those kind of things should absolutely be handled. Yeah. 

Laura:

Definitely. I think that’s us pretty much done with our hour we’ve got today, we- I’m pretty happy with that, we wedged a lot of stuff in there I think! 

Cari:

Yeah, it was a lot. Very cognitively overwhelming for a cognitive accessibility episode! 

Laura:

It was, but we got it all done and anything we didn’t it’s fine. We’ve got that sixth episode at the end of this where we will be doing our little grab bag for anything we want to wedge in. So thank you very much everyone, for watching yet another episode of Abletop. The next episode we’ve got going up, Episode five, will be about communication and after that, we’ve only we’re only going to have one final episode. We’ve got a sixth episode that’s going to be our sort of bits and bobs wrap up of things we missed. So we’re getting toward the end of this. But thank you so much, everyone who has joined us on this journey. Hope you look forward to the next episode. We’ll be back with another one for you next week. Bye!

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