Abletop - Episode 6 - Board Game Accessibility Bits Bobs

Ctrl, Alt, Access

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 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.