So this begs a question to our colorblind 'geeks: "What colors would you prefer publishers use for their pieces?" As a small-fry publisher, I would be interested in knowing that!

I think maybe brightness is the key. I am red/green/brown and blue/purple colorblind. Dark red and light green are completely different to me, but if they are both dark, forget it. When they are different darknesses, I may not be able to point to which player is Red, but I can tell which player is that light red/green color. :-)

Another pet peeve mentioned above here is to have families of colors like in 10 Days in Africa. The cards don't match the board. Now if you know that this card is green and the board is a slightly lighter shade, but still green that works for non-color-blind people, but doesn't do a thing for us spectrally challenged individuals. Other games group the green pieces (light, mid and dark) as a faction and that isn't useful to me. If the shades are all different from each other, I can memorize which go together though.

I can't stress icons enough. They rule. When I have a card game that I enjoy except for the color, I rubber stamp little icons (maybe even in matching colors ) on the cards to tell them apart.

And don't feel bad, Yekrats, one of Mayfair's major playtesters is colorblind and they still put out games that don't work colorwise.

Happy Gaming,

This doesn't work with painted cubes and such, but for printed colors it can help a lot to open your image in Photoshop (even if it's a PDF or an EPS or what have you), choose Image=>Adjustments=>Hue/Saturation, and slide the Saturation all the way to the left (no color saturation). If there are grays that look identical to you at that point then there's a pretty fair chance someone's not going to be able to tell them apart, especially if they're the common pairs. Adjust the brightness levels of one of the confusing colors and try the exercise again... eventually you'll end up with colors that still look decent to those who can see color but that can also be differentiated (generally) by the color-blind.

If color is the only identifying characteristic, limit the palette to the fully saturated Crayola 8

Secondary clues are the best solution. Icons, shapes, fill patterns, outlines, etc, all work wonderfully. Even if they are subtle, we will notice them.

To answer the question of what colors to use, don't use hues close to each other.

The colors I prefer (for six players):

White and/or Black (depending on special pieces)

if you can't use white and/or black, I've included two extra colors that *should* be colorblind friendly:

-stopsign Red
-Teal (light blueish green, more green than blue)
-Navy Blue (a medium to dark blue, almost smurf or ocean colored)
-Electric Neon Yellow (or bright construction yellow)
-hunter green
-pumpkin orange

(construction yellow also contrasts well with construction orange and construction red)

and of note, the green and yellow on BGG are poor color combos