Methods

Methods

The process I use to make most board games accessible is generally pretty simple though often quite tedious. Here I attempt to summarised the methods I have used with no major focus on particular games.

Assumtions

This guide and this entire website are written with the following assumtions. First, that the wner of the game being made accessible is okay with perminantly changing core game components such as boards, cards and tokens. While this can be avoided in some cases, such as by sleeving cards before putting braille on them, this is not always possible and adds further cost. Secondly, I assume that the blind players are competent braille readers. While not needed for some games, the vast majority of board games rely on reading text which can only be made accessible via braille. In some cases, braille can be substituted with custom tactile symbols however this only works if there are few components that need adjusting and that these components do not have large amounts of information they are attempting to convey.

Card games

Many card games are relatively simple to make accessible such as games like 6 Nimmt or The Mind. These kind of games only have numbers and or suits on each card which are easy enough to braille up manually. Typically I will right a list of numbers or the first letter of the suit such as “b” for the blue suit in the crew or “c” for clubs for a standard deck of cards followed by the number the carde represents or the first letter of the name of the face cards such as “k” for “king” in a standard deck of cards. These can then be easily cut out and stuck on the corresponding cards with the aid of a sighted assistant.

Often, many card games like these will have seperate cards with more information such as in the crew where there are mission cards detailing the goals for each game. In the case of the crew and other games like it, these cards are public knowledge and can simply be asked about by the blind player. The only issue here is if every one in the group playing the group is blind however I have not yet had this occur. ###

Boards and Maps

Most board games consist of well, a board. And to blind people, these boards are typically a flat piece of cardboard with no useful information what so ever.

Grids and boundaries

The primary method I have used for making boards accessible is through the use of Grid tape. Grid tape is a very thin tape, around 2-3mm, across that can be obtained from office supply stores. While it is intended for marking up grids on whiteboards, it works quite well for providing a tactile line to make drawings accessible. For board games specifically, lines on the board can be covered by Grid tape to make them tactile so blind players can feel them. This works both for gridded boards such as is found in games like Tigris and Euphrates or Scythe and for region based games such as small world. For square grids, adding the lines is relatively simple, just put a line of tape along each line on the board. For hex grids however, this is far more tedious as the tape does not bend along corners well so each edge of a hexagon must be cut and placed separately. For map based games where boundaries of regions may be curved, care must be taken to follow the lines without kinking the tape else it will not stick properly.

Information on the board

Games rarely consist of just grids or outlines of a map. They typically have information that is important to know about a given part of the board. For example, in Scythe the type of territory of each hex, like tundra or lake, is very important. For scythe specifically, I have added braille to the board in each hex to label them. The braille I have added to each hex simply consists of the name of the type of territory the hex represents and if that hex has a tunnel.

For other games however a simple tactile marker might work better. For example, in small world, as well as braille for the name of each region type, I have added more grid tape in various patterns and shapes to indicate important features of some regions, such as if a given region is a magic zone or has a cavern.

For both scythe and Tigris and Euphrates, I had to make the locations of rivers on the map accessible. As the rivers in scythe run along the edge of hexs, I added some off cuts of the adhesive paper I use for adding braille labels along the hexagon edges that represented rivers. This distinguishes them tactilely. For Tigris and Euphrates however, rivers are part of the grid squares instead and run across the board consisting of many squares. To make these squares tactilely different, I did not place tape between two squares that represent river spaces so that any square on the board that didn’t have tape on one edge was a river section.