By 
Quick Points
- 💜 No board game can be 100% accessible. Don’t let the fact you can’t make it accessible to everyone stop you from doing what you can to allow more people to play.
- 🚧 Games are made of intentional barriers, accessibility is about unintentional barriers that arise which cause a mismatch of experience for players with access needs. As you design, ask yourself where unintentional barriers are happening, this will help you to solve them by design as opposed to in retrospect.
- 🪜 Consider a staggered teach for your game, across one or multiple plays of the game, to help players get comfortable with rules before adding more.
- 📶 Games that start simple and build in complexity as play goes on can be a good way to holistically incorporate a teach into a game experience.
- 🐚 Include catch-up or rubber-banding mechanics in your game to help level the playing field for players who are behind, especially on games with a live score track.
- 🎲 Consider ways to mitigate randomness, not just in dice but in other places with randomness, like card draw.
- ♟️ Provide access to basic resources/cards as a backup to a random card/item, to give players more agency and a greater feeling of control over randomness.
- 🛍️ Give ways for players to reset shops / offerings to help give them more ways to search for the resources they need.
- 🎁 Try to do as much for accessibility as possible in standard versions of your game so players don’t need to invest in add-ons or alternative components.
- 📂 Provide free resources to allow players to adapt common barriers in your game to their needs, such as free print-at-home stickers.
- ♿ If possible you could create specialist versions of your game to accommodate accessibility barriers, but try to keep the cost comparable to the original version.
- 🃏 Create cut-outs in boards to help with picking up cards.
- 🔓 Allow and promote players bending rules to fit access needs.
- 🎛️ Provide variations of gameplay that address unintentional barriers in your rulebook, online or in FAQs.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:22 – Making Board Games Accessible
04:18 – Building Up a Teach & TCG Tangent
14:26 – Rubber Banding
18:51 – Randomness
26:01 – Financial Accessibility
29:48 – Canvas Mobility Spotlight
31:18 – Asmodee Access+
35:23 – Game & Rule Adaptations
44:37 – Outro
Transcript
Laura:
Hello and welcome to the sixth and final episode of Abletop. It’s a six part little mini series that we’ve been doing, talking 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. How are you doing?
Cari:
I’m good, thank you. How are you?
Laura:
I’m good. It’s flown by! It does not feel like we’ve been doing these for six weeks.
Cari:
I know. It’s so wild, but I’ve been having such a great time.
Laura:
Indeed. So this is for what we currently have planned. This is the last one of these. Who knows? Maybe it will come back at some point in the future for some reason. But for now, this is our little grab bag episode. This is tentatively on our notes described as; bits and bobs, wrap up, things we missed, stuff that we didn’t have a better home for in one of those, like, clearly defined episodes. But we still very much wanted to talk about before we get stuck into some of these examples.
I think this is a good point to like talk about something that we’ve mentioned a little bit here and there elsewhere in the series. I think we talked about it in the first episode, but I think it’s important to come back to as a bookend for this. There is so much variation in in board games, so much in the way of like, unique considerations that one game is not going to be able to take a piece of advice we gave because it’s integral to an intentional barrier, something that is important to making a game accessible and is very easily done, might not have come up in this series because it’s unique to a barrier that we haven’t foreseen. No two board games are the same, and as such there is only so much we can do and only so much that I think board game designers can do to be truly accessible. We’ve talked about the fact that video games, for example, as a comparison point, have the benefit of being able to have tweakable settings without having additional physical production costs per copy associated with that and the board games, the more that you start wanting to account for variations of board games, you know, we recognise those costs existing so this series is a starting point, but it can never be fully comprehensive. I think it’s important to talk about just because there is so little that we can say universally applies to every board game should be doing.
Cari:
Absolutely. And I think as well, like because we’ve come from the video game space thinking about the way that people interact with video games. There’s so much with assistive hardware and there’s only so much that can be done on the board games on point for that kind of like access for things like dice towers that we’ve talked about or card holders or things. And I think like it’s important to know that like in the video game space, I feel like I’m pretty comfortable in saying at the moment like 100% accessible board game to every is tabletop video, video game, 100% accessible video game to every single person is a little bit of like we need to still work towards that and for board games, I think like looking at it and going, we’re not going to make this accessible to everybody shouldn’t be a reason to not try and make it more accessible to more people. So yeah,
Laura:
Yes, just because there’s not that same degree of easy everyone should be doing it wins that we can point at and go; this is the basics that basically apply to everything. Doesn’t mean that it’s not important to make the time to make those distinctions about what can we do, what can’t we do, and are we being honest with ourselves about whether we should be doing more or not with what the design of the game is?
So yeah, talking about like more of those bits and bobs specific things that we didn’t have homes for in other categories. We talked a little bit in the first episode about like doing the teach for a game and the accessibility of the tutorialising for a game. But one example that I think really stands out as a great format of game that does that often does the teach very well, is legacy games in terms of building up a teach over multiple play sessions that are designed inherently to slowly introduce new mechanics over time, something like Mechs versus Minions. It’s not a legacy game in the sense of like you’re ripping up components and permanently changing things, but it’s got a sort of a campaign story mode that introduces new mechanics over time, be it changing how its board layout works, opening new boxes that give you access to new tools, allowing you to level up your characters and give them gradually introduced new mechanics. That’s one of those kind of examples that makes the teach easier by gradually easing you into it.
Cari:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think something I thought about here, I mean, I’ve heard Mechs versus Minions brought by loads of people and I’ve talked about like learning a new board game and the teach and things, but something that I discovered kind of recently. So my partner and I are really into trading card games. We play a lot of Magic the Gathering, we’re those kind of people. But he was interested in trying out Disney Lorcana and they have like a gateway box and this is like a get some starter decks, play some games and learn how to play the game. And the way that the tutorialise it was so approachable and it was this kind of staggered way that like you got your starting deck, and it was smaller than a standard deck would be and they would be like, Right, this is the basics of like playing cards and how to do this. So play this game with the, with the two decks and there’s a little list of things to check off. Like you’ve played a card and you’ve spent this much on this. And then once you’ve done that, you move on to the next step and you open up an envelope and you get new cards out of it and then it’s okay, you’re going to learn the mechanics for these cards. And it was obviously very, very well designed because it’s Lorcana. It’s supposed to be approachable to a younger audience than something like Magic the Gathering. But I loved it from like a learning the game approachability standpoint, like just having and not being overwhelmed with information and having regular breaks between games. The little checklist that you could take off if you wanted to, or if you felt confident, you could just go past it. That, to me was a really fantastic onboarding experience.
Laura:
Yeah, I think bringing up like collectible card games and TCGs, I think the complete antithesis end of that and a great one to learn from for a bad example of a teach is Yu-Gi-Oh! and I say this as someone where Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably my favourite of the trading card games that are out there. I recognise that it is an insurmountable teach. It is an impossible teach if you have not played it over the years because that game, in order to power scale and keep people buying new sets, their approach was to introduce new summoning mechanics that not only were similar enough to easily confuse them with each other, but functionally different and exist in ways that speed up the game to a kind of intimidating degree. And I feel like what Yu-Gi-Oh! 20 years in could really do with is one box set that is like, hey, here’s a handful of like pairs of decks start playing with these. It’s Yu-Gi-Oh! as it was 20 years ago with maybe you’ve got fusion summoning, that’s your only special summoning mechanic. Get used to the resource system, how summoning works, how the basic gameplay works. Cool. When you’re comfortable, move to the next pair of decks that introduces synchro summoning. That’s one new mechanic to learn, but everything else is stuff that you know from the past pair of decks you played. Here’s another pair of decks that now introduce XYZ summoning. And, like having like maybe five pairs of decks, ten decks total in a little starter box that someone could go, I’m comfortable with these mechanics. What’s the next one that got introduced in history would be so much more approachable than what it is right now, which is monsters come in seven different colors and they all summon in different ways and you have to understand all of them before you can even get started.
Cari:
Yeah. As my partner adores Yu-Gi-Oh! and I got into, he made me one deck and he taught me how to play with that one deck. And I was like, This is enough for me. There’s too much text on these cards apart from anything else!
Laura:
Me and my wife will occasionally play Yu-Gi-Oh!, she is a much more Magic the Gathering person. But I specifically made two decks where I was like, there was a very clear game plan, and about five of the summoning mechanics just don’t exist in either of the decks. It’s like, here is some cards from the anime and some decks where it’s like every card is trying to get your big boss monster out. And we’ve had fun with it. And I’m just like, I dread the idea of trying to teach the modern context of that game as a first teach. It just is a game that’s gotten away from itself in terms of that regard.
Cari:
I think just the kind of last little point on this since we’re talking about it. So I’ve done quite a few like Magic the Gathering prerelease events and there are a lot of fun. You go along and you get some booster and you make a smaller deck. But I very much feel like I need to do my homework before I go to those where it’s like, What are the new abilities that are going to be coming in in the set? So I know what they are because otherwise it’s going to slow me down. When I’m building my deck for the prerelease, it’s going to mean that I’m not going to be as tuned in to like, how is the synergy going to work with these things. I kind of wish in those prerelease packs or like even in boosters or things where you’ve usually got that extra little card that they have at the end that links you to the online version of the game or gives you a token or something. Could they have something in there where it’s like, these are the new things that been introduced in this set and here’s a little breakdown of what they do. And then you don’t need to hunt for a specific card that has that specific ability and stuff like that.
Laura:
So as terrible as Yu-Gi-Oh! is, one thing they do well, or at least did last time I purchased structure decks is that structure decks will have like a fold out bit of paper that goes, this is the game plan, this is what you’re aiming for. This is like these are the cards that lead into these things. And I feel like you could do something like that for a new for a new booster set for Magic the Gathering. Go, these are the new things. These how they synergise. This is what this new set of boosters is sort of walking people toward. One thing I will say in Magic the Gatherings favour in terms of the teach, I do think it really benefits from having like here are your five colours of card and each colour typically does one very specific thing, like I’m not the greatest Magic the Gathering player in the world, but I know if I am like doing a draft at a prerelease and I start picking up lots of blue cards, I’m probably going to be doing lots of counter spells. If I pick up lots of red cards, I’m going to be doing lots of burning, probably. If I’m picking up lots of green cards, I’m going to be like trying to ramp up the damage of my creatures. If I do black cards, I’m spending life to do damage. And if I pick white cards I’m gaining lots of life. Like that much I can look at a colour and go, I know probably what kind of strategy it’s going to go into. And there’s very few of the other TCGs that have that kind of, even if I’m not sure about the specific card, I know which of the five general areas do I want to be in is fairly approachable?
Cari:
Oh, 100%. I agree with that. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with it for so long, is because, like, you know, when you’re talking to other magic nerds, you’re like, what colour decks do you have? And you’re like, Oh, you’ve got blue / black, or you’ve got like chromatic or something like that. And it just you start to understand a little bit more and it does make it that kind of level of approachable, and also it’s colours, it works. It works well for me because I’m a big visual learner. So yeah, but yes, but yeah, in terms of building up the teach stuff like looking at ways that you can do that, so staggered adding things, adding things in or having like a stripped back version of the game, even if it’s not something that’s a legacy game. If you’ve got something that’s a little bit more complex, are there ways that you can have like levels where you build up to more complicated play later on?
Laura:
Unknown
Yeah, I do have one example, and we brought this up in one of the earlier episodes. I love Spirit Island for this as a game in that when you’re selecting which gods you want to be playing as you have like a board that is very descriptive of this, this character you’re playing as will be good at these things, bad at these things. This is roughly how you play them. But then you’re given that that characters starting cards that are all very simple actions and you have to build up resources over the course of the game to be able to afford more complex cards like you can add low level powers to your to your deck of cards very easily. You basically pick up several, decide which one you want, put that one in your deck, just got the others. But for the major powers, you have to get rid of an existing card in your hand to gain a new major power. So you’re not increasing the number of actions you have when you take one of the more complicated powers which discourages you from doing it too early, it encourages you to play and to play with the simple abilities until you have a relatively confident idea of what you’re doing before you’re ready to start going hand neutral with taking new cards. And that’s when you start adding the more complicated stuff. And I think that’s a good pacing for a teach.
Cari:
No, I would agree. Should we move on to some of the other sort of mechanics based stuff?
Laura:
Yeah, Yeah.
Cari:
So one thing I wanted to bring up is catch up mechanics and I love these. So to give a very broad example of a catch up mechanic; in video games, people talk about Mario Kart a lot, like with the way that you have the blue shell when we play Mario Kart, because my partner is so good at it, we have like a code word that we, any one of us can say during a race. And he has to stop playing for 15 seconds because he’s just too good. Like the blue shells won’t dent him. But in board games, I’ve seen it before with things like Tokaido or Namiji, where you’ve got a style of movement, where you’re stopping at different places and the person who moves next is the person who’s like last in the queue. And it means if there’s spaces in front of them, like the idea is, okay, I really want to get to the space with the whale on it. So it might be three spaces ahead of me. So I’m missing opportunities to go to those, but at least I’m getting the thing that I want. But then for other players it’s opening up the opportunities behind you and it means that people at the back can have several turns in a row where, yes, they may not been able to get the thing that was most valuable, but they’re able to get more things in different places and kind of have a bit more varied play. And the other example that I thought about with this was Quacks of Quedlinburg. And I’m going to absolutely butcher the explanation of this, but basically on the score track, there are little rats or little mice. And depending on where your sort of like score marker is in comparison to the person in the lead, you gain extra points based on like how many rats or tails there are in between you and them at different points in the game. And it’s just this kind of like built in catch up mechanic and I find those are fantastic for helping to level the playing field in terms of like especially if you’re playing with a group of people that have played the game before versus you like there’s something there to be like, here we can, we can help you catch up and we can help this feel a bit more competitive.
Laura:
Yeah, it’s the term for that. Usually here in video games is rubber banding mechanics. And one of my favourite examples of this is a cycling board game called Flamme Rouge, where you are basically trying to do competitive cycling with a pair of cyclists. You have sort of your sprinter in your pace keeper in each team and being at the front of the pack obviously means you are closer to the finish line. But being the front of the pack causes you to take more exhaustion and put more and negative cards in your deck that are going to be poor fare for later games, you know, going to cause you to struggle more. Whereas being at the back of the pack, you don’t take that exhaustion and you can slipstream, which gets you some free movement to speed you up. And there is a deliberate interplay of whoever is behind is usually getting free bonuses, not getting negatives that will impact them later in the game, which not only keeps the pack closer together, but incentivises the player in the lead to maybe deliberately drop themselves back to try and, you know, not be in first to be to be a very close second and to keep both players like within about one space of each other so that they can be getting that slipstream and it disincentivises one player dashing off ahead until the finish line is within a couple of turns of being achieved. And I think that does a great job of making that game feel neck and neck the whole way through because you are so disincentivised from running ahead.
Cari:
And I think that’s something when you’re playing a board game and you’ve got like a live score track and you can see someone like pulling ahead, like it becomes, it does become demoralising a lot of the time. I think, well, for me it’s always Dixit. When we play Dixit, I don’t know what it is with my group of friends, but I I’ve always I have to go around the board twice when we play because that’s honestly how we found the best way to balance it, because people just go like, Cari’s clearly cheating at this. I don’t know how one can cheat at Dixit, to be honest, but that’s fine. But yeah, like you say, keeping it that that neck and neck and that sense of like not necessarily having someone fall behind and feel like, you know, they’re learning a new game and then they’re also seeing this live score update and go, Oh, I’m doing really badly because I’m not performing as well as everybody else. I think like, yeah, catchup mechanics and rubber banding mechanics like that is a really good thing to implement into the game if that’s something that you’re able to.
Laura:
Yeah. So moving on a little bit from that one aspect of game design that I know is a real barrier for a lot of people is games that have too much reliance on randomness and feeling like you are not in control properly of the game. And like I’m not saying that heavy randomness cannot work in game design. I think again, this is not a board game example, but I think of something like Mario Party is a classic video game example of sometimes if you go in knowing that deliberate randomness and everyone’s going to get screwed over is the point of the game, I think it can work. But in a game where that is not the case and there is meant to be a degree of the best player wins, excessive randomness without mitigation can be a point of like real frustration with game design. And there are different ways you can you can mitigate that that randomness things like the tool cards that exist in Stardew Valley, for example, I think a lot about I tend to play Stardew Valley as the person digging through the mine, trying to get specific resources from the mine. And as you upgrade your tools as the person doing the mining, you start getting options to be like, Oh, you rolled to mine on this exact space of the mine. Maybe you’ve upgraded your axe once so you can go on the space that you landed or one space up from it, or by the time you fully upgraded your axe, you can go up to one space in any direction, giving you a lot more control over what starts as a very random element. And I do like that as a way of mitigating it because it sort of rewards progression with reduced reliance on randomness.
Cari:
100%. That’s like the perfect example because yeah, I thought of that too, in terms of like, yeah, you’ve got the randomness element and as it builds up, it’s something that you can do, you can deal with. There are game examples, things like King of Tokyo where it’s called the Yahtzee approach of, you roll the dice up to three times and you have to like pivot your strategy in the middle, but there are like cards that you can get to help you to be like, oh, if you rolled this, or you can change this face to this. And it’s similar with so this game called Seasons and it’s got a it’s a beautiful mix of several different genres and it’s a game that I really enjoy. But you start by rolling the season dice, which is the dice for spring, summer, whatever, and then those become the dice that are available for people to use and they show what actions they can do. But there is power later on and on your board as a player to be able to change that role in terms of like, okay, I’ve gotten these actions, but actually I can change it to something else and I can do this differently. But there’s also randomness, not just with dice, but with things like card draw randomness, or like when you’re drafting as well. Like what kind of cards do you start with when you’re draft? There’s a lot of RNG elements and I think it can help a lot of people if, for example, you’re thinking about if we think about the randomness of something like Wingspan where you’ve just got like 500 bird cards, you know, you know, are there things where you can have like here is a sample, hands like that you can set up for something and it’s like and there’s less randomness or you can, you can do a little bit of, of set up in terms of like, okay, we’re going to try and arrange some things so that there will be some cards available that you would like to do so that you can take instead of this like other things that you can do to make it help with the randomness element. I think of something like Wingspan in particular. You just have so many birds and you just don’t know what’s going to come up. And you know, especially when you buy all the expansions and you’ve just got too many of them and it’s very, very hard to try and plan a strategy around them because there are similar ones, but they’ll be like one particular one that you really want because it’s got an ability, but the likelihood of it showing up is really low. So yeah.
Laura:
Yeah, I wonder, just talking out loud whether you could integrate into a into a game some kind of mechanic around. Maybe you get to select fewer cards, but you have a bit more control over what is drawn. So like, you know, let’s say you’re doing a game where it’s like you might get to draw three cards in a town, offering the player the ability to go. I only get to draw one card instead of three, but I get to look at a larger number of cards to select that one from something that is a mechanical trade off to reduce randomness at a point where you’re getting frustrated with. I’m just going and going and not getting what I need. Yeah, but beyond that, you’ve got like the ability to, when you play, say, deck building games, having mechanics around things like use a single action to refresh the entire shop row so that it all refreshes. Things like that can be good ways to quickly dig through and find something useful rather than feeling stuck with what happens to be at the top of the pile currently.
Cari:
Yeah. The whole refreshing thing is like really important. We play a lot of Wingspan and we have now, sort of, very much value the birds where it’s like reset the tray and then you get more options.
Laura:
Yeah.
Cari:
Because like it’s just much more reliable. You feel like there’s much more control than just drawing off the top of the deck. Yeah, I think in one of the expansions you get the new board and I think there are points where you can spend resources to reset that shop. But, but I really like that that’s something that’s in Verdant as well, which I think I talked about a little bit before. Like you’ve got a shop area that’s got different tiles and different cards and you can spend tokens to be able to reset any number of those of either one of the tokens or the cards. And that’s just really, really helpful for mitigating that.
Laura:
Yeah, Well, one thing well, while we’re on this still that I think really helps the mitigation of that kind of randomness is having basic resources constantly available. So I’m thinking of like, deck building games where you have, you know, your randomly dealt out shop row, but you also have a couple of stacks of; this card is always available and this card is always available. And usually I think it’s something like Clank where you will have some basic attackers and some basic movement units that are just constantly available to purchase. But if you were to have something like Wingspan and offer players a mode where it’s like you have the completely random deck of birds, but maybe you also have one pile, like one pile of very low value birds for each of the three locations, so that if you’re just desperate for a bird, for a specific location, it’s not going to be good. But there is an ability to go. It’ll be for the place I need it to be for something like that to go. It’s not the optimal choice, but it’s a choice. It will definitely fit where I need it to fit. I can help as an idea to mitigate that kind of randomness.
Cari:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that can be balanced by like maybe it costs extra resources as well, even if it’s not the most optimal and things like that. But yeah, I agree. Randomness can be, can be something that can be a real barrier and can be, be tricky as well in terms of just feeling hard done by, by the RNG sometimes.
Laura:
Yeah. So another area of accessibility that we really didn’t have a good place to chat about elsewhere is financial accessibility. It’s no secret board games are not cheap at the best of times and disabled people, we often do not have the same access to funds as other people in that it is expensive to be disabled. And while there are some things that cannot be helped in terms of the production cost on board games being what it is, there are ways to make it so that if you want to have an expensive fancy addition of your board game that can coexist without necessarily the point of entry necessarily having to be hugely expensive examples of this being when Deep Rock Galactic’s board game had its Kickstarter. There was a tier to just get access to the tabletop simulator edition of the game, the digital edition. That wasn’t going to involve any physical parts or anything being posted out, and that it was a way that someone could purchase and play the game that was obviously going to have a lower barrier to entry.
Cari:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think like, yeah, the financial accessibility of like we’ve talked about things like dice towers before that can help people, but, you know, not every game comes with it and it might be something that you need or like set up trays before, like we have, we have player trays for Frosthaven, which helps keep all of our stuff organised together. And it’s fantastic for tablespace, it’s fantastic for visibility, and it’s much easier to grab the specific card that you need without all of the tucking and everything because you’ve got little slots where you can put in. But all of these things, regardless of if they’re if they’re something that is like officially licensed or something that’s extra, they’re all little things which can not be accessible to somebody because it is a financial barrier. I think with board games particularly, there’s so much with upgrade kits. And I’m like, there are so many games where I would really like to have a cheap way to make a board game that is not colourblind accessible, colourblind accessible, like, you know, like stickers or something like a nice, a nice way to do that. And even if it was something where like, okay, it’s print at home or something like that, like are there free resources that you can provide to your players to help reduce that barrier? Because I’ve seen so many upgrade kits which are fantastic and they do the job and they take colour out of the equation, but they’re usually quite expensive as well, so.
Laura:
Yeah, it’s- I think part of it is like looking at the idea of can you make your basic version of the game as affordable as possible in terms of like, you know, often that means you having cardboard components and this that the other offering then sort of scaling up. So hey if someone wants a more expensive version, they can get it. But that’s not a requirement to getting into the game. And then as you say, going if there are accessibility accommodations that you can think of that you do want to offer, but that you, you know, don’t think are reasonable are going to be able to the base game. Can you offer that separately, be it as an individual thing to purchase or as, as you say, offering free tools to go here is something you can produce yourself. Here’s the materials to do it that you can use to make your game more accessible without that needing to be a very expensive, bespoke inclusion.
Cari:
100%. And like those things as well, I’ve seen with like different versions of games or different add ons as well, like we’ve talked about before, like Codenames, having the extra large version, which is a bit more approachable from a vision standpoint. One of the ones that I kind of want to talk on this will hopefully segway in nicely is the expansions to Canvas, which we talked about in our visual episode. When we talked about mobility, we were talking about being able to pick cards up off of boards or off of tables in the expansion to canvas or one of the expansions. You have a proper board now. So it’s not cloth. And they have one of my favourite new things in board games, which is holes in the board where the cards are so that you can pick up the cards more easily and it’s like you’ve got the two rows. One of them is by the edge of one side, so you don’t need it there, but it’s like in the middle of the board. And I opened up and I was like, What are these for? And then as soon as I put the cards down, I was like, Oh, this is exactly what we talked about. Like, and it’s just, you know, they didn’t need to do that, but they did. And it just makes it easier. And the cards are slippy slidey anyway. And so it was lovely to see that accommodation in that. Canvas has like shot up to the top of my like one of the most, one of the games that considers accessibility so much in it in terms of everything that it’s done. So I’m really impressed by it. Yeah, I thought that was cool.
Laura:
I think that’s really cool and it’s so nice to have in this short span of time. We’ve been we’ve been recording these, have a game, have something new happen to it in the period of time we’ve been talking about it. That’s lovely.
Cari:
No, it was really cool! But yeah, talking about like financial accessibility and talking about other versions of stuff I’d like to talk a little bit about Asmodee’s Access+, I’ve probably butchered the name of that company. I apologise, but-
Laura:
I think that’s correct!
Cari:
But yeah, so they there wasn’t a proper place to really talk about this. Our cognitive episode was like chock-a-block full of stuff, so.
Laura:
Yeah!
Cari:
But the whole purpose of the Access+ is that they’ve created adapted versions of games and they’ve worked with, they say on their website that they’ve worked with health care professionals to develop a line of games adapted to people living with cognitive disorders. So it’s quite interesting to see the kind of different stuff that they’ve done. I haven’t played any of the games personally, but for an example, there is like Dixit Universe and in Dixit Universe, the cards have been carefully selected and they’ve been divided into two levels of complexity. And there are two game modes proposed in the rules to make the game as accessible as possible to players. It also adopts a little bit of Stella, which I’ve mentioned before, where Stella’s a bit like Dixit, but there’s a word deck card, a deck of word cards. And so it takes that like having to think of the prompt out of it. So players draw a word card and then they vote for illustrations that best match it either individually or as a team. And it also includes some free resources and free game elements they’ve got. I had a look at them and it’s things like word cards where you can write your own prompts on them. It’s got different large print voting cards as well, so it’s really cool to see the resources that they’re doing, and each of the games on the Access+ site have a little graph that kind of shows in a visual form, sort of like the core areas of where of like where that game is most complex or least complex. But I really thought that was fascinating in terms of having like a sort of section of tabletop gaming that is dedicated to helping people with cognitive disabilities and sort of leaning on what board games do well and how they can help. And I think there’s a lot of thought force on like cognitive rehab, rehabilitation and things like that that I think that they’ve- I get the impression that they’ve leaned into that.
Laura:
Yeah I was having a look at the graph in the notes document we had and I don’t know why I was so surprised to see this, but I was caught off guard at seeing emotion management as one of the considerations of board game complexity because yeah, 100% that can be a barrier in board game play like recently with some friends, I was playing a couple of hidden role games. We played the Battlestar Galactica board game and we played some Donner Dinner Party, hidden role games are definitely a game genre where if you are the hidden player, managing your emotional responses and reactions to things is definitely part of game mechanics. But even just something like if you’re the person that knows which words have been selected in code words or Codenames, not giving away information to your teammates unintentionally is a barrier to do with emotional management. And yeah, I was just really positively surprised to see that there.
Cari:
I think it’s all of the kind of areas are really interesting. So I like to give a bit of example. They’ve got like mental imaging, emotional management, short term memory, speech and discourse, planning, and motor skills and those are just some examples, but I think it’s really cool. It’s quite obvious that they’ve done quite a lot of work, as they say, with like health care professionals to really understand the different barriers that would be that would occur for people trying to play these games. And I know I agree with you. I think that that’s fantastic. We talked a lot in our communication episode about the social dynamics of stuff, and I think it was really nice to sort of see it reflected in this as well.
Laura:
Yeah, So yeah, there’s not a huge amount we’ve got left for this, for this episode I think. Yeah, I think our place to end maybe is just more generally talking about that idea of adaptations, of finding ways to allow different ways that players can play your game and allowing players to sort of adapt a game to their needs. You’ve got a really nice example in here, I think, for this one.
Cari:
Yes, so Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, having- in complete contrast to everything that I’ve said so far in the series where I’m like walls of text; hate them. Can’t stand them. I love Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. I do tend to outsource the reading. I will give that to somebody else. And I’m more the note taker and I’ll be like, we’ll be reading out conversations. I’ll be writing down the clues and like different points, trying to find them on the map. But that games scoring mechanic is like, you are basically challenging Sherlock Holmes. And the idea is that you count down how many leads you’ve taken. So it’s kind of like a choose your own adventure if you go to whatever entry it is. So you note down every entry and then at the end you compare how many entries you visited versus how many entries Sherlock visited. And you also have the questions about the case to answer. Now, Sherlock fully will be like, I went to three places and then like you have like a lower score because you’ve gone to significantly more than three places, usually because you’ve gone and looked at different things, and they’ve got a little bit of balancing in where they have like sort of I like to call them the side quests, they’ve got like a secondary thing that’s going on. And if you find out information about that, then that helps like bump your score up. But genuinely, honestly, I find the scoring really, really boring and I don’t like it. I think it just doesn’t make it fun. I much prefer like going to as many leads as possible and like following the trail and speaking-
Laura:
Playing as much of the game as possible! Seeing all the things the designer designed for you.
Cari:
Exactly. And like all the writing and all the conversations and everything, like I much prefer doing that and I feel like I have a much more fun and holistic experience when I’m not worrying about how many leads we’re taking and it just becomes much more fun. You get wrapped up in the story for me personally anyway, and then the group that we play with so yeah, I think it would be really cool if there was a bit more, a bit more of like a sort of consideration for people that wanted to do it in that more completionist way, because I think it’s a shame. The idea of like play this game but like try and get only go to like five or six places.
Laura:
Yeah, try and minimise how, try and experience as little of it as possible.
Cari:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think, yeah, it would be really cool to have different ways to play that and be a bit more like approachable. Like every time I bring it up around people that I’ve played it, I’m like, Oh, but I don’t score myself like we don’t use the scoring. We just played to have fun. And it always comes with that little bit of like shame of like I’m not playing properly. So-
Laura:
Exactly.
Cari:
It’s tying back to adaptations and just the openness to help people find what works for them.
Laura:
Be willing to, as a designer, say the game I have designed, as I have designed it may not be the best fit for you and modifying the rules as written, if agreed by your group is not playing the game wrong. And having that openness to, you know, I think this is similar to the way a lot of people treat, you know, being a DM in something like a fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons is; rules as written exist as structure to get you going with game mechanics, but ultimately are only as important as they are to your group and being open to being flexible with a rule set. If it’s going to make for a more fun experience, should, I think generally be something that more game designers open to.
Cari:
Oh yeah, 100%. I remember talking to somebody about the way the that I DM, especially combat encounters, and they were horrified because I was like, I make a big boss and I don’t give them a health value. I just like we play the encounter and when it feels cinematic and epic and appropriate, that’s when the boss dies. And they were absolutely horrified when I told them that. Or things like, I plan like different actions for the boss to do and sometimes I will do a bit more of a cinematic like, okay, this will happen, this will lead into that. But I tend to find that works a little bit better for me. And I can find that like, yeah, as you say, sometimes the rules-
Laura:
Yeah, yeah. Like for me as someone that has, has DM’d fifth edition for a podcast setting where there is like a degree of narrative of pacing that needs to be considered. What I will often do compared to the stats as written in the rule book, is I will have every thing dealing more damage and having less health than it usually would. And this is sort of true both for player- for generally for the things that players are fighting against. You’re not going to have to hit them as many times to kill them, but they’re not going to have to hit you as many times to kill you to keep that pace going. Scaling damage. So that hits are heavier in both directions, effectively makes it more fun for the way we’re playing. Or, you know, I’m a big believer in the rule of cool. If someone at the table has a really fantastic idea and everyone at the table is getting hyped for it, it’s not going to totally break the mechanics of everything completely. I will lean on the side of saying yes because it’s a cool moment for the story. Like because where’s the fun in being. Well the rules don’t technically say it’s like no, you had a great idea. I want to reward your creativity. Off we go!
Cari:
Oh no 100%. I did a Christmas one-shot a couple of years ago, and I accidentally completely ruined the- I was a player. I completely ruined the final boss fight because I cast invisibility- see invisibility when we were in one of the areas and I was just like doing the whole what Critical Roll does where they can see into the ether and it’s all super fun. And then the boss, the main thing the boss was meant to do was like, go invisible and try and escape. But I still had my see invisibility active. So but then the DM was just like, well, I guess it goes this way. And it just turned into this really like it wasn’t like a big massive fight anymore. It was just this like kind of still really funny, like, slightly anticlimactic in terms of a combat encounter, but like climactic in terms of just like the ridiculousness of how the situation occurred. It was it was great. But like, yeah.
Laura:
One of my favourite moments I will ever remember from a D&D session was; my character was trying to investigate a cult and had been convinced into doing drugs. And I jokingly offhandedly said to my DM, because we’ve been doing campaigns where like there is one word per season that is like the, the thing that the universe, the state of the universe can be summed up in one word in each campaign we were doing. And I jokingly said, I’m high. Can I roll insight on the nature of the universe? And I got to 20, I got a crit, and the way my DM played it out was “Cool. I’ll tell you the one word that defines the nature of reality for this campaign, but no one will believe you because you were on drugs when you worked it out. Everyone will think that you’re high.” So I’m like, that’s great. That is the moment that like nothing in D&D’s ruleset would allow me to do an insight roll on the nature of reality. But in the moment it works and you roll with the story and again, pulling it back. I’m not saying that every board game needs to be quite that degree of loosey goosey with the rules, but I think being open in your ruleset to if this isn’t working for you, it’s okay to agree is a table that you know, this mechanic is isn’t a great fit or you don’t want to include this in or like making it obvious which things you could optionally just not engage with. And that’s okay because if the rules say it’s okay not to do a rule, then it feels less bad to ask not to do that rule.
Cari:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly that It’s sort of like the permission and the like. It’s okay. And like, I think because as we’ve talked about so much, video games have difficulty levels. Usually they have difficulty levels and they have these assist modes and it’s just not something that you see as much in tabletop. And so it means that it can feel very alienating when you have to adapt that experience to be something different for you. So yes, everything I think that bookends it really nicely in terms of, yeah, open to adaptations. If you can think about what those adaptations might be or you get feedback on what kind of adaptations those would be, providing those in places like your rule book or online FAQs, things like that. Just yeah, being open to it and being like you can, there are places where you can bend these rules so that you can still experience the core intended gameplay and things like that.
Laura:
Definitely. So yeah, I think that’s a good place for us to wrap up. I think we’ve done everything we had listed down.
Cari:
I think so, yeah.
Laura:
Thank you so much, everyone who’s joined us on this five- coming up on six hour-long journey we’ve done over six weeks. We hope you have enjoyed these deep dives into various aspects of board game accessibility. We’ve had a lovely time. I can say that we very much enjoyed doing these. Yeah, if you want to keep following us, you can try and find us on various parts of the internet. We’ve said in all these episodes roughly where you can find us, maybe we’ll do more of these in future if something comes up, but is there anything you want to plug Cari before we finish up or anywhere that people should reach out if they want to talk to you more about board game accessibility?
Cari:
I tend to use Bluesky more and more these days. So if there’s something that you want to chat to me about on there, then might be cool. Like, Yeah, I think it’d be really cool to know if people have other thoughts, other games, other ideas or things like that, because we’ve obviously been filming these with like filming these in advance. We’re not going to see those reactions till afterwards and there’s going to be things that will come up that will be like, Oh yeah, we should have talked about that.
Laura:
Oh, for sure. But yeah, we-
Cari:
Sorry, go for it!
Laura:
Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, for transparency, it’s the end of January when we’re recording this final episode. We’ve been recording them since December and you probably won’t have seen the first one until at earliest February? So we will be keeping an eye on those comments. We are looking forward to learning about new things and new examples we haven’t considered and maybe a little way down the line, we do an episode where we collate a bunch of things that you’ve said in the comments to these, put them all together. But yeah, thank you so much everyone for watching. We hope you have enjoyed and maybe we’ll do other things at some point. Okay!
Cari:
Bye!
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