Abletop – Episode 5 – Communication Accessibility

Quick Points

📝 Provide options to use different communication methods, like verbal or text-based.
😶 Consider supporting play without verbal communication, by default or as a variant.
📈 Give levels of difficulty in games where speech is not allowed, such as allowing some speech, one word, gestures.
📈 Give levels of difficulty in communication-abstraction games, such as giving more options to pick from or ways to focus the clue.
🎨 Avoid a reliance on colour for visual communication games.
🎤 Social pressure to roleplay, be funny or be quick-witted can be a huge barrier. Consider ways to support or reduce social pressures if possible.
💜 For improv games, consider providing more specific hint cards or fall-back options for players who struggle with improv.
❌ Provide a no-judgement ‘out’ to end a round early if things are getting too much.
☝️ Consider if your game could use interruption mechanics to give less confident players a mechanical way to take the wheel.
🕵️ If possible, make hidden roles optional to your game to make it approachable to more people.
🎭 Deception is difficult for some players, consider how the mechanics of your game can help support deception or provide a way for individuals to opt out of deceptive roles.
🛣️ If the game keeps going after roles have been revealed, set clear expectations in the rules that it is likely or inevitable. For longer games, ensure revealed players still feel like they have an impact at the table.
🎛️ Make rules variants, like having roles all revealed or no talking between players, to alleviate or omit some of the social pressures.
📱Provide ways or tools to help anonymity (companion app, one player presents all options, etc) where it is important for player-submitted parts.
🔤 Where spelling is important, allow spell-checking devices at the table.
⏳ Remove timed elements or provide extra time for players who struggle with writing and/or spelling.
🤟 Provide ASL / BSL guidance for communication in your game if possible.
💬 Overall, provide ways to reduce speech or support alternative communication methods.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:47 – Communication-Based Games

11:24 – Abstraction of Communication

18:09 – Visual Communication

26:58 – Improv Games

35:22 – Social Deduction & Hidden Roles

48:40 – Dyslexia & Literacy

54:05 – Alternative Communication

56:59 – Outro

Transcript

Laura:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Abletop. This is a five part series of videos about board game accessibility. I am one of your hosts, Laura, I go by Laura K Buzz on the Internet, and I’m here as ever with my lovely co-host, Cari Watterton. Hello, Cari! How you doing?

Cari:

Hello! I’m good, thank you.

Laura:

We’re back. We’re on the last one of these that we have, like a solid, solid overall focus for. We’ve got our sort of Bits and Bobs episode next week to sort of wrap things up. But do you want to tell people a little bit about what this week’s topic is and what the idea is for this one?

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. So the topic this week is communication. So communication in video games is often talked about in terms of like player to player communication. So it might be like text to speech or speech to text, emote wheels, pings, that kind of thing. In board games, communication often plays a much bigger role because most games are played with more than one person and often there’s player interaction that happens. So there’s a lot of things like that that you need to be communicating with the other members of the team, members of the table and tabletop games can also sometimes include things like role playing, improvisation, and reading social cues for some different games as well. And some tabletop games are all about communication, which will also get onto you. So we’ve got a lot of cool things lined up today.

Laura:

Yeah, so I think that the place you ended might be a good place for us to start, which is talking about games that are inherently about communication because those are the ones where obviously this is an intentional barrier or at least an intentional mechanic that is worth keeping in mind. So one example of this is one that we talked about last week when talking about cognitive accessibility and specifically like mental health Alice is Missing is an example I really like of this because it is a game where communication is the game for anyone who’s not played it. The entire point of the game is it is a collaborative storytelling game told through a group text message conversation with game elements such as cards being revealed at certain time, points to give you prompts to steer a narrative with, but it is ultimately a game about communication. One thing that I think makes this work quite well as a game about communication is that the medium that you are told to use is pretty flexible and doesn’t need to be set in stone. There is no reason that if you will play with a group of people and someone couldn’t use a smartphone effectively, that you could play this as a conversation out loud that you treat like a group phone call. Everyone’s, you know, jumped in on the discord call. There’s no reason that someone can’t be using text to speech functionality on a phone to engage with that. There’s a lot of inherent tools either both built into using a smartphone to do text based communication or alternative ways you can structure what is just a conversation, to make a game about communication, not necessarily like locked into any particular set of barriers, I think.

Cari:

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I love that flexibility of like using what people are comfortable with. I think especially when it’s something like you’re telling a story, there will be those like improv moments and potentially role play if you’re like trying to get into character of somebody else. Like it can be nice to have that flexibility.

Laura:

Yeah. The other thing I like about Alice is Missing defaulting to text based communication. This is just a personal preference I have is a lot of times games about communication and role play can be difficult for people who are awkward socially about the idea of trying to play a character out loud. And I feel a bit self-conscious about that. I’ve run Alice is Missing with several groups of people now, and I tend to find a lot of groups find it easier to get into role play if they don’t have to think about; Do I need to do a voice? Am I going to seem silly? Where do I draw the line between things I’m saying out loud, out of character or in character? It creates a very defined space where you aren’t expected to put on as much performance to be able to get into role play. And that can often be easier for people to get into. And that’s quite nice.

Cari:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, yeah, sometimes, especially depending on the group, if you’re new to it, how comfortable you are with that kind of thing. I’ve had those experiences as well. Like, well, I’ll do a little example. This is slightly videogame, but like Jackbox, there’s a game called Monster Seeking Monster. And the way that we’ve always played it is that we always change our names so that nobody knows who is who. And quite often I’ll give myself a name that’s kind of related to a monster or something. And then that gives me like a theme to riff off of, and then it’s much more freeing. And we don’t always at the end, like reveal who each other was because it’s more just like a sort of dating app kind of thing. And it means you can be absolutely filthy, but not be judged. It’s just nice. So yeah, I agree with that. From the text based communication point of view, it can sometimes be a lot easier and you don’t have to be thinking about what you’re saying while you’re saying it. You have a little bit of break of thinking about what do I want to say and how to phrase it in text form.

Laura:

Yeah, And I think that that also just plays into the inherent biases we have around text based communication. It is something that we expect there to be downtime between messages. If someone’s doing something else and comes back to the text chain, there is this sort of not expectation to instantly respond that there isn’t a verbal conversation which can take some of that pressure off.

Another example, and this is one that I think is a clearer example of like very unavoidable barriers in a communication game. There is a board game called Consentacle. And the idea of the game is that it is a human and a space alien and they do not share language trying to have a gay space interaction. And it is a game about intimacy and one that requires players to play without talking to each other. You are supposed to intuit what the previous player has been playing and what that might mean. They’re going to play next and try and play cards without verbally communicating. That will line up and synergize with each other. And the way that that game handles barriers around communication is suggesting degrees of lack of communication and that like having multiple examples of, hey, we would recommend starting with you can’t say any words out loud, but maybe you can mime things. Okay, maybe you can’t mind things, but you can now make it a little harder by only doing facial expressions. Okay. If you want to make it even harder, can you just do eye contact? And do you think you can convey with that little what you need to convey? And the game is structured to be like there are degrees of difficulty. Find the one of these that’s fun for you in that it is still an a challenge.

Cari:

Oh my gosh. I love that, that is… The last one where it’s just eye contact sounds like a nightmare for me because I’m so bad with eye contact.

Laura:

Agreed, I’m terrible at eye contact. But I think there is honestly I like how it fits with the theming because there is a degree of experimentation and finding what works out for the two, what works for the two of you, what allows you to communicate that information without words, and how like finding where that line is fits with the theming of the game about trying to navigate intimacy, I think.

Cari:

Yeah, no, absolutely. No, I think that’s fantastic. Yeah, there’s a lot there in terms of like reading social cues at least. So you got like the cards that are playing as well as kind of like something to fall back on too, in terms of that communication aspect of the game as well. I think like when you were talking about games where no player speaks, the thing that came to my mind was a game called The Mind, and that is it’s really simple. I don’t know if anybody’s ever been to theatre camp before, but sometimes you do this thing where you start in a circle and then you try to count out from one. And it’s the idea that only one person can say the number. So that’s basically The Mind in card form. So you get, you’ve got 100 cards. Deal out a number of cards to each player so you don’t know which ones you have and then you have to, without communicating with each other, try and play the numbers from smallest to largest. And it is very fun, but it kind of requires this like syncing up to play. Understanding, like kind of everybody else’s internal timing as well. Like every single time I played it with new people, it’s been like a different period of time, played between like the ten and then before we go into the twenties and things like that.

Laura:

Yeah, for anyone who’s not played it, the whole sort of thing that you’re trying to feel out is; let’s say the number on the stack is ten and you’ve got a 15. How long do you leave it before you are confident no one has the 11 to 14, but not so long that someone with like 16 or 17 thinks, Oh, is it my time to jump in?

Cari:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly and like, it’s really difficult. And it can be especially challenging with new people. And so, like, there’s this where it’s great from a ‘you don’t need to speak’, so it takes the speaking barrier out of communication. But there’s a lot in terms of just being really aware of like a group and I found that is different in terms of with people that I’m really comfortable with and I spend a lot of time with. I can play this game for hours and then with like different groups of people where I don’t know them so much, it becomes a lot more taxing because I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with these people that I don’t know as well. So like that’s kind of where part of the barrier comes in, too.

Laura:

This has made me think of an example we don’t have on the document. This is a jackbox example, again, a game called Blather Round, where you are trying to communicate like, you know, your secret thing might be a person or a story or a film or something, and you’re trying to communicate it with deliberately poor clues you have on your smartphone to give other people. So you might be trying to describe Pinocchio. And ‘it’s about the small, the small tree boy’, you’re like trying to talk in circles around the thing you’re trying to communicate with awkward wording. And that is another one of those games that it is about struggling to communicate a thing and needing to get into that vibe with other people of, do you understand the kind of hints I tend towards and what is important out of my bad sentence?

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, for Blather Round it’s kind of, a kind of abstraction of communication. We can, we could hop down, we could start talking about that a little bit because I think that flows nicely? So the whole thing with the abstraction of communication is like, you can’t say the thing directly. So Blather Round is a good example. We’re going to say the F-word here, we’re going to say Frosthaven again, like the whole concept with the Haven games is that you can only discuss in vague terms what your planned moves are with your with your fellow players. You’re playing cooperatively. So the idea is that you’re sort of going, oh, I’m going to try and do this, but you can’t tell them. You’re supposed to not tell them what the number is basically for your initiative.

Laura:

Yeah. And for what your group determines too much or too much information or vague enough information is very group to group. I know the longer we’ve played Frosthaven and Gloomhaven, we’ve gotten more and more, less and less vague over time. Just because of what, well, what’s going to be fun for us? We don’t say the number, but we’re like, Oh yeah, I’m going to be very fast for me. You know what that means!

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. Or like we’ve got ‘the medium-fast side of slow’ we’ve got this absolutely convoluted way of-

Laura:

Occasionally I will have turns where I’m like, I need this to happen in the right order. And I’m like, look, if I were about a third of the way down the hypothetical maximum range of things, you know. Yeah, yeah, it’s not, yeah, hold you to the number, but you get what I’m saying.

Cari:

No, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, like it’s once we have found that when we’ve played characters for longer, we understand sort of like those ranges that everybody has now. And then we’ll be like, okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do sort of like what my standard speed is. So if you can go faster or slower, depending on what we found, that’s really helpful. But especially when you start in your character, you’re like, you just don’t know what everybody’s things are.

Laura:

I think Frosthaven and Blather Round are an interesting contrast in that they both approach that abstraction of communication in very different ways. Frosthaven is very vague. There is one rule which is don’t say the number, but it leaves it open to you where the line up to that is for your group. Whereas Blather Round is: the difficulty will be the abstraction of communication. That’s going to be a fixed thing. Where you can find the difficulty modifier is do you want something that’s going to be easier to explain? Do you want a do you want a word or a clue that is going to require less digging for really complicated abstractions to get to?

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They’ve got like the easy select section and you can refresh the things that you get in front of you as well. So you can pick something else if you’re if you’re not confident or if it’s not something you know very well. One thing that I like about Blather Round as well is that you can use words that people have submitted in some of the clues. So if someone’s but you can say like, oh, it’s like if someone said Spider-Man somewhere you can be like, it’s like Spider-Man or it’s nothing like Spider-Man or something like that.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

So I think that’s a nice way to bring your group’s communication into the clues.

Laura:

And I like that it is so frequent. I think it’s basically every other clue opportunity you have is here is everything I’ve been guessing so far. Is it along is something along the right tracks is something way off? Is do you want to give a comparative comparison to something? It allows you to have those moments of someone’s on the right track. I at least have the words to zero in on that. And I think that really helps be more direct to the rest of the clues like you be.

Cari:

No, absolutely. I think that’s true. I think in terms of talking about like games where you’re giving clues for things like Codenames is one of those, where it’s got heavy word association stuff, but Trapwords is one that I think for the abstraction part is like really good. So Trapwords is similar to Codenames. You have a word and you’re playing it in teams. You’re trying to describe that word to your team and the other people that you are playing against are going to write down ten Trapwords so they know what you’re trying to explain and then they’ll put things on. So for example, your clue might be like beetle that you’re trying to say to your to your team. And then the trapwords that the other team might write down might be things like shell or insect or something like that.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

But you don’t know what the trapwords are. So then you have to try and think, what could they have written down? And try and describe it in an even more abstract point of view. And so I think it’s a very fantastic game of communication abstraction. And well, the only rule that we’ve really found is that we’re not allowed to use like proper nouns or like in jokes as well. So I tried playing it like versus my parents. And because it’s like two different, like completely different age groups, my parents didn’t have the same culture, pop culture references as we did.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

So that was something as well in terms of like, yeah, you can just have vastly different interpretations of what a word might be.

Laura:

Yeah. I think that like there’s, there’s a few different demographic places where that could be a barrier for, for a game if that idea of are you using the same, the same vocabulary, be it through age, geographic region, knowing that if your game is so dependent on language, will people intuit the same things from words being said?

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. And like, things have different meanings. And going to the Codenames example, I had a really good set up once where I had, War and Change that were two things on the board. There was something else as well. I can’t remember what it was, but I was able to use Fallout as the clue because as a whole, war never changes. And it was only very specifically in that group with those people. Whereas it’s something like when I am playing games like Codenames with my parents, like it’s a case of like sometimes their references don’t land with me and my references don’t land with them. So it’s trying to think about what do I know about their, about what they would be thinking about with this. But I agree with you. And it can extend to, like you say, different languages. Like you can play a lot these games with people who like either don’t speak the same language as you or speak very little of it. And it’s just trying to like bridge those barriers as well.

Laura:

Yeah. I think the last little category in that abstraction of communication is games about visual communication. One of my favourite examples of this is a game called Mysterium where players are trying to- basically trying to intuit a murder location, murderer and weapon via abstract dreams. And the way that this is done is that there’s a game master who knows what objects and people and locations they’re trying to communicate to the player and has a limited set of cards in their hand with very complicated pieces of art on them, where there are lots of things you could take is the important piece on the art, and it is about the communication between the game master and the player of: you’ve given me this card. Am I meant to zero in on the fact that it’s largely blue and that sort of matches the color palette of this room? Or that it has a lion in it and there’s sort of a lion mounted on the wall in this room? Or there are sort of soldiers and there’s like tools in this room? And trying to work out which of these clues is the one that I should take in as important. And that is a game that is like very deliberately about there is no way that the one clue we give you will be enough to reliably know what you’re being pointed out. You get given multiple abstract clues and you have to try and find the commonalities in the abstractions. Is realistically your way through.

Cari:

Yes! I love those games. We own so many of them because we just we really enjoy them. I’m a really visual person anyway, so those games and they always feel like a nice comfort. But yea, Mysterium. I think exactly everything that you’ve said and Obscurio is another sort of like version of that game by the same people. And it takes it to another level because there’s a traitor involved. And so the traitor has an opportunity to put like false leads out there basically. And that’s really, really interesting from that point of view. As a team, you’re working together to find the right door that you’re trying to get through, and so you’re looking at the kind of clues that are out in front of you. The person who’s in charge of that one has this little book and instead of it being like, I’m going to give you this entire card, they’ll be given a couple of cards and they have little pointers that are magnetic, and they’ll point to either the entire card if they think that it’s a really good match or specific elements on it. And so there’s a sort of evolution from Mysterium there where there’s almost like a narrowing down of what the clue giver is able to point at, but then there’s also the added complication of if you’re playing with a traitor. Then you’re like trying to avoid a potentially obvious path to sort of go down as well.

Laura:

Yeah, I would say by comparison, Mysterium can struggle from a problem that it’s not unique to Mysterium, it’s the problem of being the person with the handful of cards trying to communicate whatever you’re trying to communicate and just not having helpful options in your hand. There are a few things that’s frustrating in a game of Mysterium, as I have a handful of clues and not only are none of these going to help the player zero in on what I’m trying to communicate to them, but they’re actively going to send them down the wrong path and they’re going to make them think the wrong thing. And I don’t have alternatives. Mysterium tries to get around this by having like three crows. So like three times in a game you can use up one of these crows as the game master to get a fresh handful of cards, to have new images that hopefully won’t lead the player in the wrong direction. I’ve sometimes found that three is not enough and I find that game more satisfying to play, sometimes, if we go; look, don’t stress about only being able to do it three times. If look, if you have a hand where it’s like, yeah, something in here could get you to the right thing, it’s not an ideal clue. Yeah, stick with your hand. If you only have things that are going to send them in completely the wrong direction and nothing is going to even vaguely get them toward the right thing, sometimes it’s just more fun to just go have a fresh hand, have a clue that’s at least advancing the game state, or has the potential to.

Cari:

No, I would agree with that entirely. We’ve ended up going down many different paths where it’s been like we just don’t have enough. And like it particularly happens when you give out clues in the first couple of rounds and people don’t cotton on immediately to what you’re talking about. And then you have to like do that refreshing early on and then later on you don’t have that kind of catch up in it and you sort of start running out of time there. But yeah, I agree with you. Like, one thing that I do like about it is that the refresh is like as many cards from your hand as you like. So you can look at your hand and you can go, okay, actually this is going to be helpful for later on because I can see what everybody is going to be going to so you don’t have to get rid of them all. But yea I would agree. And I played it once, because we have so many of these, we played at once with Dixit cards instead of the Mysterium cards. And oh boy, that was like playing on hard mode because I didn’t like I thought like, Oh, we’ve got all these different things, all these different cards that we can look at. But when we actually played it, we went; There is something where the Mysterium cards just have more layers to be able to pull on and the Dixit cards are almost too specific. And so when we did that, it was like we’d need to rebalance this refreshing!

Laura:

For any difficulties there are with Mysterium, having like deliberately abstracted visual communication as a barrier. I think it is a game that is well worth learning from in terms of if you want to make a game of this nature. Mysterium does a fantastic job of balancing the amount of detail, the amount of specificity and the amount of variance between the cards like they do genuinely have a very good ability to feel specific to a moment, but be applicable in lots of different contexts. Like they have really nailed that.

Cari:

Oh yeah, 100%. Like yeah, I love the Game and its sequel, Mysterium Park is really good, but the only thing that I found with that is that it’s set in like a circus and every almost every location has like fairy lights or light bulbs and it’s like because it’s one of the brighter points on the cards, it’s like where our people’s eyes go to, but that it’s just not helpful. Clue because every single thing has it, but they have some nice stuff with like an alibi or something like that. If somebody guesses the witness, they give somebody guesses the witness, they can like move their guess. So there’s a couple of nice kind of extra things there. But yeah, the kind of visual communication stuff I think is really cool. And again, that’s something where you could be playing it and be playing it with a wide range of different people. And I think especially for something like Dixit, I found that that is much more approachable to a group where we’ve got lots of different cultures and backgrounds and things, and it’s interesting to hear like, okay, I’ve said this word to associate with this card, and it’s interesting to see what other people put down and what other people interpret. I think that’s because, yeah, we like, we like it nice chill. We don’t play very competitive. But yeah, it’s a really interesting sort of communication experiment. Yeah.

Laura:

Do we have any other points on abstraction of communication we want to talk about what we’re on this still?

Cari:

I don’t think so. The only thing that I kind of mentioned in here, which I think actually fits better up for we were talking before, was talking about the King is Dead. And that’s just another point of like you can’t discuss your team strategy if you’re playing it in teams and you just have to like watch what the other person is doing to be able to try and figure out like, okay, are we doing this or are we doing that? And it’s really funny. The King is Dead in general is just a wild game. It’s ridiculous to me, but it’s just chaos incarnate and playing it in teams where you just can’t talk to each other. You just have to look at what the other person is doing is so funny to me, but I can see it being really, really stressful in for like certain groups of people or for other people. But like, if you don’t know someone very well or if you’re still learning the game and trying to figure out, then you’ve got that extra barrier of, I’m learning the game, but I’m also trying to figure out what my partner is, is going for and how we can work together on this.

Laura:

Yeah, so pulling back to where we started talking about communication games, one of the first examples we gave was Alice is Missing and that sort of leads us on to talking about improv games, games that have a degree of not just communicating with each other to tell, you know, to tell narrative, but perhaps having social interactions. You need to navigate. And there’s definitely some examples of this that that are a little can be a little tricky.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, improv games. One of the things that I have, we have a great group of friends, but one of them is really, really, really struggles with improv, which is completely fair and completely like on bad days, I struggle with improv. Unfortunately, it’s the theatre training in me, which is the only thing that helps me through it sometimes.

Laura:

For me, it’s eight years of weekly D&D sessions.

Cari:

Exactly. But yeah, so some examples of like improv games with a lot of social pressure and roleplay are things like Funemployed. That’s a game where you get dealt out cards and you’re the person who’s dealing those cards is like the interviewer interviewing for a specific job and the cards that you get in front of you, you have to somehow spin them into your imaginary identity and why you would be good for this job. And the cards you get in front of you are sometimes things like ‘Shed’ and it’s like, What do you do with that? Do you have a shed? Do you work on sheds? Are you a shed? And it’s very ‘Yes, and’-y. And it’s great. It’s a really good, fun vibe. But it is, there’s a lot of social pressure. There’s a lot of social pressure to be funny as well, like it can be and that can be something that can it stresses me out sometimes as well. I’m like.

Laura:

Yeah, it’s one of those things that like your, Jackbox is an equivalent, like mobile video game one that’s sort of found a way, a workaround with usually having a; I’m struggling – come up with an answer for me button. Inherently you don’t have that safety net to fall back on with boardgame equivalents and that is just something to be aware of as an additional pressure.

Cari:

I almost feel like it would be good to have, when we’re talking about Blather Round with like the ‘easy’ options or like you say, write this for me. It might be good to have things like if you are struggling, here is a bunch of like prompts that you can grab from and you can use it. It’s something that’s a bit more put together. I think that would be really cool in a lot of these improv kind of games.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

I think Someone Has Died, which is the other example that I have there. Is this little game, where it’s a similar thing. You get dished out like a sort of character in front of you, and the whole idea is that someone is going through a will and they’re trying to figure out who they’re going to give all these things to. And it might be like Poseidon has died. So you’ll find out who’s died and then you’ll find out your relationship to that person. And that one is nice because it’s got like, this is your relationship to the person. So you can there’s a bit more to build off of there and then you’ve got other elements as well in terms of there’s objection cards and it would be like, Objection, this person has done this. And so there’s a bit more specificity which brings a bit more comfort to the players in my groups are not super into improv. Because there is, it’s much more specific than just shed, you know, and that can be helpful.

Laura:

Yeah, another one that can be difficult for a specific kind of person is are your games about arguing or persuading where there is no correct answer? It is, can I more confidently state my answer? So you’ve got games like Snake Oil, Super Fight, where the whole point is- and this is a specific skill. It is a it is a practiced, cultivated skill that not everyone has the hand of confidently going, I’m going to make up whatever I have to make up to confidently sound like I’m right and to confidently deliver that to sell myself. As yeah, no, no, no. I am of course right! I will state it so strongly that everyone at the table will just assume it’s correct. And that can be intimidating if you are not experienced at it. In that it is putting a lot of pressure to not only improv, but to be the most, to have improv-ed the best. Whereas a lot of improv is ‘Yes, and’ – it is collaborative. It’s about building upon and adding upon. These kind of games tend to be you by yourself need to do essentially the improv equivalent of a monologue better than everyone else’s, and that is its own unique kind of barrier.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. And especially like when the game is something like Super Fight there is, there’s no right answer and it does come down to like arguing and that’s part of how they pitch that game as well is like arguing with your friends and it’s like for some people that’s just straight up not fun. Like, yeah, like I don’t, I don’t enjoy it. I don’t like arguing with my friends or feeling frustrated. It’s just and that is something that there’s a bit of a barrier and it can be very, very alienating. So again, I think it’s like, yeah, go for it.

Laura:

It could be sometimes important, I think, to have a conversation before and after a game like that of, Hey, if I say that your answer sucks and mine’s better, it’s not because I think yours is bad. It’s because the nature of this game is I have to try and one up. And, you know, having that touch in of; some people are going to feel a bit more personally attacked when that happens and making sure that, like you have the conversation upfront and you check in afterwards and go, everyone knows that, that it was all in good fun or even just having the ability to go, Hey, if I need to raise my hand to go, this is feeling a bit too-

Cari:

Yes.

Laura:

-much like an actual fight and to go, no questions asked. Yeah, we leave the argument here and we decide at this moment who seems to be in the lead, that can really help.

Cari:

No, I think some of the safety mechanics that we were talking about last time as well can be applied to some of these social games in terms of just making sure people are comfortable at the table.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

One really good example that I want to bring up to kind of round this off was is a game called Once Upon a Time and it is a collaborative storytelling game, but it’s done with cards and it’s very fairy tale focused, which is really nice. It makes it quite approachable for a lot of different audiences. And the idea is that you have a hand of cards and it’s like places or items or people or things like that or events, and you’re trying to improv a story and playing these cards as you’re doing it. So you’re not monologuing too much. You have to have some pace to it. But as the game goes on, other players can hop in with either they can use interrupt cards. So there are specific cards to be able to let you interrupt a part of a story, which I think is great, especially for someone who is sometimes a bit like socially awkward, like you get you’re given that pass. You’re given that pass, like actually hop in and take part, which is really good. And the other thing that you can do is if somebody says something that is on one of your cards, like if someone says the word dragon and you have dragon in your hand, you can take over because you have that card. And I think that that is nice in terms of you’re building the story together. It has built in interruption mechanics that allow people to avoid that awkwardness of like, I don’t want to talk over you, I don’t want to like, but yeah, I don’t like unnecessarily take over like that’s built into the game and I think that’s I think that’s quite nice. I enjoy it as a sort of approachable improv game.

Laura:

I think that’s a great example. So yeah, in terms of time, we’ve got to churn through! We’ve got so much to talk about today in this episode.

Cari:

Sorry!

Laura:

No, no, no. We are communicating a lot in our communication episode! So I’m going to maybe suggest we wrap the next two things into each other because I think that there is a lot of overlap between them is the difficulty of social deduction games, which often has heavy overlap with hidden role games. A lot of them, they’re not always the same genres, but there is a lot of overlap between the two of them. So social deduction games; stuff like Werewolf, Blood on the Clocktower, reading cues can be a barrier inherent to those. Those are games where you as a player need to intuit unspoken information about why is a person playing this card? Are they being genuine when they explain their actions like this? But there is also the reverse issue, I think with those kind of social deduction games, which is when you are one of the hidden roles that’s trying to go undetected, you have to be able to communicate deception. You need to be able to lie and not make that obvious, while also having the added pressure of reading the room, reading the table, working out if anyone has sussed you out. Anything of that nature. These games really, really hard if you’re autistic. They are games that are purely about reading unspoken facial expressions and intuiting what’s going on, or pretending to be something that you’re not in a social setting. Quite tricky.

Cari:

Yeah, they’re terrifying. Like, I really enjoy them when I am with groups of people that I know very well. And, like, I think that’s the kind of the key there. The kind of, for me, an example, where that didn’t happen was the first time in the most recent time that I’ve played Blood on the Clocktower, I was at a conference. I hadn’t played it before, and I was like, you know, they were doing a big social thing and I was feeling a little awkward and I was like, I’ll just go get involved with this. And at least I can try it and I can see what it’s like. And it was there was a lot to deal with. There was a lot of like trying to figure out what was going on. I was very stressed with trying to figure out what like who was doing what, so much so that I actually misread and misinterpreted my own role. And then I made an accident, but I did it in the right way that it actually succeeded. And then everyone was like, Oh my gosh, you’ve done it. And I was like, What do you mean, was that not supposed to happen? And so that was one of my fantastic like, okay, I’ve gotten so in my head about all of this that I’ve just like, messed this up.

Laura:

But yeah, I think one of the most important things I would say for accessibility in these kind of games, and I only have one example of this being done really badly is if you have a hidden role game and the hidden role is uncovered, and that essentially makes the hidden role players position unwinnable, let the game end then and there. Don’t drag it out. Because it is not fun to play one of these games when you have failed to do your social role and now have to stick in that failure state. Example of this I think of is the Battlestar Galactica board game. You might be playing as a Cylon as one of these sort of like, are you not really one of the people that the crew members you do you’re doing, you’re working against everyone else’s actions. But if you are discovered, the game doesn’t end, the game plays with you just having a much less interesting set of I’ve been discovered actions and can drag on for multiple hours past that point. And that is not fun. It is the example I point to of misunderstanding like- the worst that social deduction can be is when you have to sit in having failed with it for as long as that game makes you.

Cari:

Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. That’s. Yeah. And also the feeling of like you’ve been discovered now, so you don’t have as much stuff to do. I know that I, we have, we’ve played dead of winter, we haven’t played it with the traitor because there is an optional element and you don’t need to and, and we didn’t want to the first couple of times we played with it. I know that the traitor has stuff that they can do afterwards. I don’t know to what extent, but it’s this idea of if you’re allowing the game to become asymmetrical in the way that someone’s role is revealed, either having it end there or making sure that they have enough and that they then feel empowered and like making if it’s like, okay, it’s been revealed that this person is this and it’s more of an event and it’s less of a you failed this social interaction. It’s more of a this was going to happen at some point. We were going to reveal the big bad guy and now you’ve got all this stuff that you can do.

Laura:

Yeah, you maybe got a head start by staying hidden longer, but you didn’t fail by the inevitable coming to pass.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly And I think that can, that can help. And also just setting that expectation that like there are going to be hidden roles, they are going to become revealed. The game will still continue to play. It is not like it’s just a change in style and it’s not like a failure or something like that because it can be difficult and you can sort of like feel defeated, especially if your actions and things get made to feel less impactful after that result. So yeah, I oh yeah, I would agree with that. But that sounds, yes, a couple of hours when you just feel less impactful at the board. Yeah, it is giving the same vibe of like when you’re playing a really big strategy game and you’ve just got like attacked by everybody, you’ve got not very much army left and you’re like, I’m stuck in this for hours more and there’s nothing I can really do.

Laura:

It’s that feeling that you never want a board game to give you of; I can see that I am on the path to losing. And if I would like, I would ideally like to surrender right now. But that’s going to take all of the joy out of the game for the people in the winning position who want to play out their victory and see it go through. So I just have to kind of keep playing a game that has gotten less engaging for me because of my position. That’s never a situation you want, and hidden role games have the potential to play out that way if they play past the point of reveal.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are some shorter games. I think this is very much to do with like how quick the game can play something like Bang where people will be knocked out very quickly as the game is going on. But it’s such a fast game that it’s like it doesn’t matter so much. It’s just like you’re not you’re not stuck there for hours. You’re stuck there for like 10 minutes, like while you’re watching the chaos of everything else going on. And I think there’s also something to be said for we’ve talked about asymmetry before and symmetry in games. And I think that like for games that have hidden roles, it can be helpful if there is a version of that game where everybody has symmetrical actions and then you’re sort of like you have a better understanding idea of like what is available to everybody, and then you can use that in the first game or the first couple of games to get comfortable with it and then start to introduce some asymmetry with like this character does this with this characters, that that was my Blood on the Clocktower problem, is that there’s so many different characters and I had to understand what I was and I had to understand what everybody else was doing and what everything meant. But at least with Blood on the Clocktower, because people do, like, they do get knocked out of that game, they still are involved in like all of the conversation stages. It’s only the sort of voting stage that they’re not involved in, which is, well, they get one vote that they can spend after they’ve like died in the game. And I think that that’s really cool because then as that player, you’re still engaged in those conversations and then you’ve got all when do I want to use this? When do I want to make this weighty choice that I now have a limited resource of?

Laura:

Again, this is not a board game example, but one hidden role game that I think does do a good job of even if you have been knocked out, still feeling engaged potentially with it is Among Us. In the that game, if you’re not the person trying to kill everyone your job role is go and do your various tasks. If you get killed, you still need to get your tasks done. The win condition is still everyone completes their tasks. You now can just get on with your tasks without the killer being a threat, you are still working towards that victory condition and perhaps doing so more easily, even once you’re no longer able to impact the social deduction element of the game. And I think like that is definitely something that can be learned from in that genre.

Cari:

Yeah, I think like something that would be kind of cool to see in games is more of the option to have the social deduction be an optional part of the game, maybe even for just some groups of people, maybe it’s like actually like these three want to play with it and the rest of us kind of don’t like is there is there something there cool there where, you know, probably most likely in games or so is social deduction is not the core of it. And like we’ve said before, in every single episode, these games are have unavoidable barriers in them and it’s just being aware of those.

Laura:

But again, I think that like you would be surprised at looking at communities, what they find as ways to remove social deduction elements from games that should inherently be about social deduction. Again, sticking on Among Us just because it’s the one I have examples for here. I’ve seen people turn that game from a social deduction game through custom rule sets into everyone knows who the killer is and the- everyone’s trying to do their tasks, but the killer’s movement is very slow, so it becomes less a game of trying to work out who the killer is. It’s keep paying attention and don’t get so engrossed in doing your task that the slow moving killer has time to get to you. And like that’s taking an existing set of rules and just tweaking one variable so that it’s no longer a social deduction game, but largely employs the same mechanics. And I think that like there are ways to take rule sets and go, could we have a game mode that reuses most of what we’re doing but isn’t social deduction? Sometimes if you think about it, there are options.

Cari:

That’s really cool. I love that. I don’t I can’t think of any board game applications at the moment, but yeah.

Laura:

No, but it’s a line of thinking I think is worth considering. Yeah.

Cari:

Oh no, absolutely. So talking about like obviously a huge part of communication is speaking, is being able to, like we’ve been talking about, like giving clues to people, talking about stuff. There are some games where your speech style being identifiable is a detriment and we’re kind of thinking along the lines of some of the Jackbox games here. But there are board game equivalents, some of the things like Quiplash, Drawful, Fibbage, things where you’re submitting answers that you want other people to fall for. But then your speech style might be difficult, might be like, it’s really easy to pick out some of the things that I really like. It’s where they introduce some updates to include answers that had like typos in them, or like remove Americanisms and stuff like that. Because, yeah, it’s the worst thing in the world when you come up with the best answer, that’s going to be fantastic. And then you put a typo in it and then it’s like, Oh, well, people know that’s me now.

Laura:

Yeah, I think, I think this I think this spreads across like more categories as well because there’s obviously like old typos. There is one person in the room is American, in a room full of British people. And oh, I can tell from the spelling, but I can be in a things like that can be inherent tells. And sometimes you work around that by making sure that like having alternative ways to give your answers in a game can sometimes be helpful for that. Like, let’s say we’re playing a board game that is in the vein of something like a jackbox game where you’re submitting your own answers and everyone’s writing their answers down on a whiteboard and you know that your handwriting is very distinctive or your spelling is likely to have areas that will be distinctive suggesting at the table, Is there an alternative way where, like we give all the answers to one person and one person reads out the options of answers and that person will know probably who’s this who’s, but no one else at the table will? Finding ways to facilitate if that’s that identify-ability is going to be detrimental in game. Can you set the game up in a way where voting players don’t have that information?

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the handwriting point’s a big one as well. Like, Yeah, because it’s. Yeah, the same thing that you say and, and yeah, I like that, that solution of, of doing it that way. Or maybe there’s something where there’s some kind of companion app where you can submit it through text instead and then you’ve got that option where you don’t even, you can just eliminate handwriting from the, from the barrel entirely. So yeah, I think one of the other things when we’re talking about like writing things out or like typos and stuff as well, it kind of leads on to some of the barriers in communication with like dyslexia or also like knowing words for words. You go for it. You’re the expert.

Laura:

Yeah. So obviously, like, we’ve got the examples and things like, you know, play playing games like Bananagrams, Boggle, Scrabble, anything where like knowing how to spell words and reliably spelling them correctly and recognising their spelling at a glance. I think for those some of the obvious things are make it okay to have tools at the table for checking spellings. Ideally, if you know someone struggles with spelling, can you remove timing elements or give extended time limits where applicable. For something like Boggle where someone might need longer to process; Here’s a jumble of letters and I need to turn them into words. You know, maybe someone has like two turns of the timer, so they’ve just got a bit more time to work with. Scrabble, not considering it cheating to open up a dictionary and look, despite, you know, I tournament Scrabble people would say like, no, no, no, you need to know the words from heart. Like looking at a dictionary is cheating. No, If you need to pull out your phone and try typing it to check, it’s spelt the way you think it’s spelt. Make that available.

Cari:

100%. I do that all the time as well because I’m like the worst, like I’m also really bad at it, like when I see words written out, if I haven’t heard them before, I’ll just, I saw sauerkraut written down on the first time I saw it written down I went; what is saver crust? And things like that. And so it’s really difficult sometimes to like know exactly how something is spelt, especially when there’s like thousands of words of the English language and they’re trying to get seven letter words in Scrabble. Or like with Bananagrams, you try to figure out like also the two letter words, can we just have a reference available for all the two letter words all times, please? Because I just want to I just-

Laura:

It’s like, hello, a human being, I do know all of these, I promise. But just.

Cari:

Yeah

Laura:

There’s a lot of them to pull at once.

Cari:

Exactly. And I think like, I think yeah that that’s something when I, especially when I’m playing Scrabble it’s very much like I need to look these up, I need to check I’ve spelt this right. Because there’s also the shame element of like you don’t want to play these games if you’re going to be made fun of for spelling things wrong.

Laura:

You don’t want the moment of; I have this many words. Well, we’ve got to cross that one out because you spelled it wrong. We’ve got to cross that one out. And going from thinking you’re in a winning position to; oh, no. Several of my things got discounted is… Yeah, it feels embarrassing in the moment.

Cari:

Yeah, it really does. I agree. I think I liked Boggle a lot more than Scrabble because I like that you can have the version of the word and then you can also have the version of the word with an ‘s’ on the end of it.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

And then it’s like that gives me much more confidence because it’s much more easy for me to go; Cat, Cats, done. Like, you know, like it’s like, cool. I may not be getting loads and loads of diverse words, but I will be able to like see when there is an ‘s’ that I can utilise in creative ways.

So yeah, and I think talking about word association, we mentioned this little bit before with like code names, it can be very tricky sometimes, especially when you use a word that is like if you say like red, okay, is it red as in I have read this passage or is it red as in the color? Like things like that. And I think sometimes it can be helpful in those games. Sometimes they specify that you’re not supposed to say like what the meaning is or like what does the spelling is that you’re using.

Laura:

Yeah

Cari:

But I think that for certain groups you can kind of bend those rules a little bit to just help make that communication, that association a bit easier.

Laura:

Yeah, I think sometimes it also just helps to know the common examples where two words are going to sound the same or similar that are sticking points and have… have like a reference for those. But this is not a board game example, but example I think about a lot is there is a video game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes about bomb diffusal. And one of the modules on the bomb you’ll sometimes encounter is a list of words you read- the person the VR headset reads out and someone with the manual is looking for, but it uses a large amount of; you is it just the letter ‘u’, is it Y-O-U, is it E-W-E, is it red versus read versus red. But the way that games- that puzzle is structured, the player looking at the diffusal manual will have in front of them all of the examples that the game might throw and as a result can go. I could look at this and see that there’s multiple things that word might mean and can ask for clarification. I like having a visual reference of there’s like four things that are very similar that you might mean. I’ll check rather than making that assumption I think can really help to not accident only have that miscommunication.

Cari:

Yeah I love that. I think that’s a great idea. We’re kind of getting near the end. So the last kind of point that we had there- are you okay to move on to our last post?

Laura:

Yea, I’m great yea!

Cari:

-is alternative communication. So obviously we kind of talked a little bit about the socials of barriers and like a lot about speaking speech communication obviously extends beyond there. We talked a little bit about like using text to speech and speech to text in terms of like Alice is Missing. But I think that it’s worth bringing up that especially for some games which could be- could have like communication aspects, that there can be different ways to communicate things. The example that I’ll give is Hanabi, which we talked about a little bit in our Memory Barriers section last episode. And communication-wise, what you’re doing is you’re pointing at cards and then, that player have in their hand, and you’re saying either a number to tell them that all of those cards are that number and it’s 1 to 5 or a colour. And I think like even if we’re thinking of just like a BSL ASL point of view, I think that like numbers and basic colours is something that can be really approachable and you can sort of bring that into the group. And then if you do have a person who is like hard of hearing or deaf in your group, you can have those games where you go, cool, we can, we can learn numbers 1 to 5 and we can learn some of the colours and then we can have a break from speaking because it is something that like, yeah, they may have like the cochlear implant, but it’s taxing and it’s takes a lot to like. It can take a lot for people to still be able to be like doing that all the time. And, and so yeah, it can be overwhelming from that perspective. So putting in place alternative methods of communication, there’s a tabletop RPG called Inspirisles, and it is a tabletop RPG that helps, that uses ASL and BSL and it’s like and encourages you and teaches you some of the sort of words and phrases that you will need. And yeah, I think like alternative communication like that. And also just, yeah, are there things that you can do in terms of giving a bit more pause for someone who might want to use text to speech, or can we reduce the communication in this game a little bit so that we can have someone who’s, you know, it may even be as simple as someone’s got a cold and their throat is sore and they don’t want to be talking?

Laura:

Yeah

Cari:

It’s like, are there little accommodations that you can do there or are there things as a designer you can put into your game to be like, These are some communication barriers and this is how you can reduce communication?

Laura:

Yeah, wonderful. I think that is everything we have for this episode. We will be back next week with our final episode, which is our bits and bobs, things that didn’t fit neatly into any of these other episodes, things that we realised were worth talking about after we recorded previous episodes, our little grab bag where we try and wrap everything up. So that’s everything for this week. Thank you so much everyone, for watching. Hope you’ve been enjoying. We’ll be back with another one of these soon. Our very last episode of Abletop. Thank you very much, everyone. Bye!