In recent years, board game industry has seen a resurgence. Board games become more popular and get players’ eye through crowdfunding and social media platforms. Industry forecasters predict the global board game market will be worth more than £9 billion by 2023. Due to serious Covid 19 outbreak, people have more time to stay home and more people start to attend board game and play these games whether party, family or strategy games.
I have been a board game player and collector for many years. After playing a lot of games, I started to notice certain aspects of the UI/GUI designs that could be improved to create a better user experience for a wider audience. The post will focus on the use of color in board games, which is a big issue for board game design. Color is an important design consideration in board games and it's used in almost all aspects of game design including board, card, and pawn/meeple. Color can deliver a lot of information in a game to players with normal sight. But environment (a little dim room) and individual difference (color blindness) will increase recognition difficulty in visual. Color blindness is a common visual impairment that affects up to 8% of men and 0.5% of women.
An example that shows a fail for players with color blindness in the game ‘Yamatai’. The players have to obtain what is shown on goal card (gathering a specific number of different colored boats) to win the points. The boats are all the same size and shape and some players are difficult to distinguish the difference.
To ensure almost all people (even color blinds) can have good play experience in gaming, some design principles are listed as below and illustrated by board games.
If it can have an icon, use icon.
The most common way is to use icons in addition to color to signify certain information. Icons are a simple addition that can provide a lot of information. Previous versions of Splendor did not include the gem icon next to the colored circle and number. Add the gem icons can let players with color blindness play this game smoothly and doesn’t require big, expensive changes. The game Jaipur also used the same concept to decrease recognition difficulty (showed as below figure)
El Dorado also used icons in addition to color to identify different actions. The above figure shows the view from normal player, and another figure shows the view from player with color blindness.
If it can't have an icon, use different shapes.
The shape can also be used to differentiate between tokens in board games. Design Uwe Rosenberg adopted animal meeples and vegetable tokens in 2nd Agricola to replace different colored cubes in original version.
Size is not good to help identification
Size can also be changed to differentiate between tokens. However it’s not good to help identification in addition to color. It may be difficult to identify clearly because of small difference between two token sizes. Single token is also difficult to identify quickly due to lack of another sample comparison. The Voyages of Marco Polo had used two token size to indicate different number of resources, but players often were confused in playing process. The below figure show big tokens are upgraded to identify easily by players.
Avoid difficult color combinations.
If you can't include icons or make the tokens different shapes, the last thing you can do to help players that are color blind is to avoid the most commonly confused colors. For example, don't use red and green for the same component. Steven Harder came up with a very helpful color blind reference chart for board game designers.
Of course, designers can use tools like a color blindness simulator to look at their components through a different set of eyes.
Yorumlar