Take a look at the picture, and tell me what colour the three circled question marks are? Easy? Good for you, you happen to be a board gamer who isn’t colourblind. For me, I genuinely cannot tell the pink from the turquoise. Welcome to the world of colourblind gaming.

You’re looking at approximately 8% of the male population with the two most common types of colourblindness. Meaning they’re not able to distinguish all colours, most commonly red/green. However, there is a spectrum of colourblindness, and two people with the same classification may have different experiences of what colours they see.

It’s a common condition and is well know, yet here we are in 2021 with board game designers and publishers still not taking the colourblindness into account. Simply not taking that little bit of extra effort to make the game playable to all audiences.

I like a heavy euro game, no argument there, and was interested in Carnegie. Opened up YouTube and what do I see in the playthrough? Red and green player pieces - Discs and cubes. Difficult for me to tell them apart, and that’s in a well-lit video. Playing the game in a less than a well-lit room? No chance.

They’ve lost a backer, but does that matter? Probably not the game has already more than funded.

It just made me sad, and a little angry that this is still happening, many many years after I started the hobby. There have been so many games I’ve had to modify, or can’t even play because of easily avoidable colour issues.

Designers, because it starts with them, test your games out with a range of colourblind people. Publishers, make sure these tests get done. Just like you’d hire a rulebook editor - you do, right? - you also need to hire people to test your game for accesibility issues. I mean that includes colourbliness but there’s also eyesight issues. How many games have tiny illegible text?

I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes of board gaming having to stop now and then and ask “Is this pink?” I shouldn’t have to.

Oh and don’t ever make the mistake of thinking it is only Kickstarter games, or small companies that make such colourblind mistakes. Oh no, that’s not the case at all.

All us colourblind gamers want is to enjoy fully the hobyy that able people do effortlessly!