Cards readability ?

[Raisinatine]

I just made a ticket about accessibility issues, since the long texts on cards just make me mad. ( https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=212652 )
Also, the background contrast is bad, and a friend of mind pointed to me that she couldn't read half our nicks in the game's interface.
What do you guys think of it ?


In my ticket, I quote the text from Blackout as I think it's the best example of unnecessarily long blah blah :

"At the beginning of Round 2, you must all discard your chips from Round 1. At the beginning of Round 3, you must all discard your chips from Round 2. At the beginning of Round 4, you must all discard your chips from Round 3."

When it could just be like

"Discard your chips when a new round starts".

Every time we introduce some beginner, telling them about the card effects is a hassle, and even for us, it's not always clear, and having to zoom on cards + parse walls of text to check what they do feels pretty bad.
Am I the only one thinking that in a fast-paced game, game elements should be readable at a glance without having to play on a daily basis so you know them perfectly ?

Btw, I fixed this for me by crafting some more visible custom pictures for Challenge (and Specialist) cards, so feel free to use them if you like.

[robinzig]

I agree. I *know* the game and the cards and it's still a nightmare parsing out the important information from these over-wordy cards.

But that problem exists in the physical game too, I'm not clear what the BGA adaptation can do. (But it does seem to be harder to find the key words on screen than it does with the real card. That might just be me.)

[Raisinatine]

Well, I suppose devs should ask the game Editor or Publisher first, and not take such action on their own.
But when it hampers gameplay so significantly, if the ones taking such decisions love their game, they should just be willing to do something.

The physical game definitely has those issues, and could use both shortened texts, and replacing some with images or at least, marking important text with different color or fonts.

--
For us, one way of acting could also be to contact them (like, on BGG or with some phone call).
I probably won't bother for this game since I already reported the issue and solved it on my side, but when I did MP Jacob Frixelius about Terraforming Mars's "official" version being unplayable and us wanting the game to be on BGA, he replied within hours and game appeared in BGA's gamelist not-so-long after, despite "contracts preventing them to publish it here", so... I guess we can do our part too

...and of course, if you think my ticket on BGA is relevant... you can upvote it, too.