Cases

I am a board game designer in Montreal who has spent years watching the same pattern play out: a publisher announces a beautiful new game, and somewhere in the final paragraphs of the campaign page, buried under deluxe component upgrades and expansion packs, there is a small note: accessibility kit available separately. Colorblind-friendly tokens, braille-compatible cards, a large-print rulebook, simplified reference sheets — these exist, but they cost extra, they ship separately, and the player has to know to ask for them. I have been guilty of it myself. My early games did not include accessibility variants at all. It took a blind playtester at LudoLab telling me she had to have a friend read her every card to make me understand that a game which claims to be about connection but leaves out a fifth of potential players has a design gap, not a niche. My latest title, Tides of Accord, shipped with colorblind-safe iconography, tactile tokens, and simplified rules as standard. The cost was real. It added about 8 percent to the per-unit manufacturing cost. But nobody asked for a discount because of it because the game simply included the components everyone needed to play. Other designers I respect argue the opposite: that mandating accessibility standards as part of every base game would disproportionately hurt small publishers and kickstarters who operate on margins where an extra 8 percent is the difference between funding and folding. They say the better path is voluntary standards, shared open-source templates, and community-driven resources, not regulation that treats a cottage industry like a utility. This is a real tension in our field right now, and it is not rhetorical. As the hobby grows, more players with disabilities are asking for equal access, and publishers are weighing goodwill against production reality. I am asking the community to weigh in: should publishers bear the cost of accessibility as a standard part of every game, or is the current model of optional add-on kits a reasonable compromise that keeps games affordable and diverse? This question matters to me personally because I believe well-designed games can build empathy and bridge divides — but only if people can actually play them.