In the latest installment of Blind Lady Versus,  I turn to a tabletop board game.

Pandemic is essentially the game of being the CDC and eradicating a worldwide virus, an international pandemic.

While this game is probably the least accessible game I have on my shelf (and that’s a nice big shelf), the design of the game itself actually mitigates that.

SO:

The Bad/Untenable:

MOTHERFUCKER these disease tokens are tiny! I MEAN, JUST LOOK AT THEM.

The use of black and white here is to give you an idea of JUST how hard these little grey boxes are to see on the game board. It doesn’t much help that the tokens blend in with the board. The colors are all matchy. Indeed, even people who are colorblind have difficulty telling the tiny disease blocks apart from what I understand.
On top of that, the world map, while the cities and the links to those cities are easy to spot, the names of cities are printed in teensy weensy tiny fonts. So the actual physical game? Not so easy.

I need to  come up with a good solution for this problem. I suspect I will end up putting small stickers on all the squares on at least one side to denote that there is a disease cube there. If anyone has a snazzy location where I can get tiny biohazard stickers….

But!

THE GOOD:

Pandemic is a co-operative game. Cooperative games are great in a number of ways, and one of them is that since you don’t have to hide things from the other players,  it can be much easier to say “Excuse me, Can you please remove those three disease cubes for me as I have cured Tokyo of its infection?” But as I like to say about accessibility – if I can’t do it for myself, sometimes

That being said, I often find that the game is almost too easy. Which probably means it’s time for us to try and use the “In the Lab” expansion to go with the core game. Having looked at it at a glance, I imagine that it will be similarly challenging from a sight perspective, but we’ll see. I’ll update this post with that once I’ve played it. 🙂

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