Mattel is rebuilding Uno, Blokus and Skip-Bo for colorblind players

Colorblindness spans a spectrum, and board and card games have long treated color as the load-bearing signal — Mattel set out to make its games playable regardless of how a player sees.

Give every color a second channel: Uno cards add a symbol per color, while Blokus pieces and Tumblin' Monkeys sticks get textures a finger can read.

Uno cards gained symbols corresponding to each color, already applied across Uno Attack, Uno Quatro and Uno Flip; Blokus pieces take a diamond-like texture and Tumblin' Monkeys sticks get notches — tactile additions that open the games to blind players too. Edits for Blokus, Tumblin' Monkeys, Skip-Bo and more were slated for the end of 2024, with more to come in 2025.

Mattel pledges 90% of its games colorblind accessible by the end of 2025, with most done by the end of 2024; it builds on a 2017 ColorADD edition of Uno and a 2019 braille version.

In June 2024 Mattel pledged to make 90% of its games colorblind accessible by the end of 2025, with most of the work done by the end of 2024 — the latest step in a decade of Uno revisions that included a colorblind-accessible deck made with the colorblind organization ColorADD in 2017 and a braille version in 2019.

The upgrades give every color a parallel channel. Uno cards gain symbols corresponding to each color — a system The Dieline notes is easier to learn and already applied to the whole range of variants like Uno Attack, Uno Quatro and Uno Flip. The more intriguing work is tactile: Blokus pieces take on a diamond-like texture and Tumblin' Monkeys sticks get notches, physical additions that also open the games to blind players.

Edits for games like Blokus, Tumblin' Monkeys and Skip-Bo were slated to be available by the end of 2024, with more to come in 2025. The Verge reported the pledge on 25 June 2024.

Color is the load-bearing signal in most family games; symbols and textures give colorblind players a parallel channel instead of a workaround.

Tactile textures do double duty — they help colorblind players and open the same games to blind players.

Rolling the system across the whole variant range makes accessibility the default, not a limited special edition.

Accessibility sticks when it ships as product design, not a special edition: give each color a second channel — symbol or texture — and the whole catalogue opens up.

Edits for Blokus, Tumblin' Monkeys, Skip-Bo and more were due by the end of 2024, with more games in 2025; The Verge covered the pledge on 25 June 2024.