[nabs-l] adapting your own board games

Thu May 31 01:31:46 UTC 2012

Ashley and all:

I am not familiar with specially-made adapted games for all of the
examples you provided. I do know that you can buy brailled standard
decks of cards, Uno cards, scrabble, and Monopoly though. I will say
that I have been disappointed in the past though. I bought some
standard decks of cards from a blindness store a few years ago, and
when I received the cards, they were in zip-locked bags, not sealed,
and a friend informed me that the 2 decks of cards didn't even look
the same. I am not saying that this accurately represents all
blindness stores or all games (decks of cards can more easily be
adapted in house than many other games), but what I am saying is that
this experience taught me that I paid too much money for something I
could have quickly done myself. But, I was also fortunate to grow up
with a thrifty mother who never spent money when she didn't have to,
and she taught me a lot of cost-effective ways to make things blind
friendly.

So I know that this is a deversion from Ashley's original question,
but I think that many students like me are poor, and I wanted to
enlighten you on some easy things I have done to be able to include
myself in almost every game my sighted friends play.

Depending on the cost of a reader or whether you can find  someone
nice needing service hours, a friend or a parent, you can often adapt
games yourself for much cheaper.

For connect 4, you can put a piece of tape on one of the colored
checkers. So, it would take a sighted person 3 seconds to sort the
checkers into 2 piles, and you could then put tape on all of the
checkers in one pile. For the game of checkers, you would just have to
come up with some differently textured tape to differentiate the king
side of checkers. When you refer to Chinese Checkers, I am pretty sure
that you are referring to the game with marbles. If so, you could
potentially texture the marbles, or use differently shaped beads. You
could attempt to find beads small enough to fit into the nice little
indents on the board. For chess, you could incorporate velcro to help
the pieces stick, but they all feel differently, so they can easily be
differentiated without adaptation. You could just texture one part of
each of the black or white pieces with a piece of tape.

For a deck of cards, it would take a sighted person about 2 minutes to
put the deck in order. If you buy a deck new, chances are, it will
already be in some sort of order. But, if they are not, typically you
would have the sighted person sort them from highest to lowest or vice
versa, and then keep the suits in the same order. For example, the
first 4 cards might be, the 2 of clubs, the 2 of spades, the 2 of
harts, and the 2 of diamonds. And then you would move on to the 3's,
but you would know the order of the suits. You can easily slide the
cards into a perkins. I write the number of the card in nemeth (and
the letter if necessary with no letter sign or capital) first, and
then the first letter of the suit to follow. I do this twice on the
card, on the top left and bottom right corners as the print is placed.
But the great thing about adapting your own games is that if you are
just learning braille, you can make the cards only as advanced as you
can handle. So you could definitely use a different method than I. I
have used a slate for card games, but sometimes it is difficult.
Cards are often just too small for the card slate, and it is difficult
to secure them in a 4-line slate since if you punch through the card,
you can't slate right in the corner. I have seen and adapted several
card games in similar manners. Some examples are Go Fish, Apples to
Apples, Uno, and Skippo.

If you want a scrabble board with clearly indented squareds, then you
can buy the print deluxe edition. You can use dymo tape (I'm not sure
if they have clear, but if they don't, you can buy clear contact
paper), braille the letters and a nemeth point value, cut them, peel
off the backing, and stick them on the print letters. It might be
worth comparing the price of the deluxe scrabble to the adapted one,
but remember you can find some awesome games used online for cheap, so
it might still be cheaper.

For Monopoly, you can buy index cards colored similarly to the paper
money. I personally think that the paper money that comes with the
game is just too flimsy for braille. you can print and braille the
denominations. You can braille the property, chance, and community
chest cards. If they have to be bigger and if this means they can't
fit in their propper place on the board, who cares? You can read them
yourself. You can adapt boards in many ways. Using puff paints and
dymo tape is a good way to outline game piece spaces. If you are
concerned that a board full of houses, hotels, dice, and game pieces
will be difficult to navigate without uprooting them, then you could
incorporate velcro. Although I personally find it easier to touch
lightly.

Using these techniques might mean that you have to build your
collection of adaptive supplies, but the great thing is that most of
these supplies can be found at many stores. And, I think that you will
find that the time you spend will be rewarding. I totally support
buying adapted games, or better yet, asking for them for gifts. But I
think that if you learn to adapt things that are fun for you such as
board games, when you encounter a challenge in math class, and your
teacher doesn't know how to make things tactile, and when your science
tutor has never met a blind person and their mind is completely blank,
you can be proactive and bring out your little craft box and have
supplies and instructions ready.

Cindy

On 5/30/12, Ashley Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Which board games are adapted for blind people and which have you played? I
> hope the adapted set has print so you can play with sighted people. Everyone
> I’d play with is sighted, at least a majority of the time that is the case.
> I’ll check ILA, independent living aids, to see what they have first. I’m
> interested in connect four, checkers, chinese checkers, and scrable.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ashley
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-- 
Cynthia Bennett
B.A. Psychology, UNC Wilmington

clb5590 at gmail.com
828.989.5383