If you have ever handed a colourblind friend a fistful of red and green wooden cubes and watched them squint, ColorSym is the kind of quiet fix that makes game night better for everyone. Launched this week by designers Chris Eastridge and Luis Francisco, it is a free, open-source symbol system that lets any publisher tell colours apart without relying on colour at all. Around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency, and tabletop games, with their red meeples, green resource tracks and blue player boards, are one of the hobby's quiet accessibility gaps.
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Find events near youThe clever bit is how simple it is. ColorSym assigns three base symbols: a dot for red, a line for yellow and a chevron for blue. Every other colour combines its parents' marks, so orange is red's dot plus yellow's line. The symbols are omnidirectional, so they read the same from any seat around the table, and once you have learned the language for one game it carries across every title that adopts it.
Eastridge, a game designer and software engineer, first built the system for his own game Parks & Potions before teaming up with Francisco, the board game entrepreneur behind Brazilian publisher Grok Games, to turn it into an open standard. It is genuinely free to use: the symbols are released under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the accompanying font under the SIL Open Font License, so studios can drop them into a game and sell it with no fees or permission required. The full kit lives on colorsym.com and GitHub.
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Start organising for freeAdoption is what matters now, and it is already starting. Steelwing Games, the new studio from industry veteran Scott Morris, has said it wants to build ColorSym into its releases, and the creators are pitching it as a shared language rather than a one-off house style. If you run a games night or a club, this is worth knowing about, because an inclusive table is a bigger table. Fancy rounding up a few more players for one? Find a game night near you.
Sources: BoardGameWire | ColorSym | GitHub
