Colours and the colourblind

Though it's certainly true that if you combine an apple and a banana in a blender you won't get an orange, fruits and vegetables are sure easily recognized as icons and have fairly iconic representations:

red = apple
orange = orange (cutaway view)
yellow = banana
green = many choices
blue = blueberry (good outline view with the little "burst" shape at one end)
purple = eggplant

Not perfect, but pretty easy to remember. Even colorblind folks know that an apple is red, a banana is yellow, etc.

I like Metthew's suggestion. An alternative could be an abstract set of icons that somehow help with the adjacency relationships. Maybe something like this:

Here the number of faces more or less help remembering the order: a circle has one face, a line two, triangle three, etc. Once you reach the hexagon, you are so close to a circle that I think it's easy to remember the circle comes next.

Hi Aerjen

Did you ask the people you "..ran into..." what to use?

We had to rewrite a factory supplied training manual because it did not accomodate a staff member who was colour blind. Mick's advise was simply to write the abbreviation for each colour on a white back ground as he did not want to be interupting the flow of training by refering back to a chart.

Mick also advised there were two types of colourblindness which makes it difficult to rely on icons alone.

Seo's icons would work well if the card could also display the name of the colour.

There is some good info I remember on a geeklist if I can find it...

Ok here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/20738

If you look at the game "Ingenious" (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/9674), it looks to use a symbol structure similar to that proposed by Seo and seems to do it well. I've never played it so I can't say for sure. But I think Seo is leading you in the right direction.

The interesting item in that list is the site it references that lets you upload images to see how the images look to the colorblind. (http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php)

The beauty of Seo's proposed system, which isn't something that needs to be done in Ingenious so it doesn't have it, is that even if you were 100% colorblind and couldn't tell the colors apart at all, you'd know that the pieces that match next to yours have exactly one fewer or one greater number of sides. No knowledge of the colors is needed at all.