It’s something of a stoner thought to wonder about perception, and color is one of the easiest avenues to get lost in that realm. Did people really not see blue until there was a name for it? Is my red the same as your red? While it can open up the door to all kinds of hypotheticals, colorblindness is one of the closest things we get to immediate proof that we perceive the world differently, and that’s just covering the parameters of sight. There’s even a spectrum of colorblindness, which adds even more complex layers to the question of how different an individual experience of being alive can be.
While it’s fairly wild that it’s taken so long, it’s better late than never for game makers to consider how color affects their accessibility. Mattel is pledging to make 90% of their games colorblind accessible by the end of 2025, and thankfully, most of that work will be done by the end of this year. Uno cards will get upgraded with symbols corresponding to each color, but the more intriguing work is in the tactile elements they’re adding to games like Blokus and Tumblin’ Monkeys. The former takes on something of a diamond-like texture, while the latter gets funky notches added to otherwise boring sticks. The physical additions not only make the games look more interesting but open them up to blind players as well, which is an exciting development.
To Mattel’s credit, Uno has undergone several design revisions over the past decade. They released a braille version in 2019 and put out a colorblind accessible deck in 2017 in collaboration with the colorblind organization ColorADD. The new design is a bit easier to learn, and they’ve already applied it to their whole range of variant games like Uno Attack, Uno Quatro, and Uno Flip, to name a few. Edits for games like Blokus, Tumblin’ Monkeys, Skip-Bo, and more will be available by the end of the year, with more to come in 2025.
