A new board game is bringing more visibility to the disabled community. Focus Games has partnered with an accomplished humanities professor to produce Legless in London, a board game about playing as an amputee in Victorian London.
The Legless in London Announcement
According to the game's official page, Legless in London is a nuanced board game about disability.
It is a game where players face challenges, opportunities, and choices at every turn. They will navigate the workplace, the marriage market, property ownership, medicine, and the prosthesis market while aiming to achieve their character's personal goals.
The playable characters in Legless in London are all inspired by Victorian amputees and fictional characters from 19th-century literature. Everyone from beloved poet William Ernest Henley to Moby Dick's Captain Ahab are represented here.
In addition to being designed for fun, Legless in London encourages players to think about the various barriers that disabled people face in real life and the different hurdles they confront. Furthermore, the designers hope players will reflect on how disabled people are represented in fiction and popular culture.
Legless in London was designed in collaboration with Focus Games and Dr. Ryan Sweet, a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Swansea University, alongside a focus group of members of the disabled community.
Disability and disability history are underrepresented in culture—and especially in tabletop gaming. Many mainstream tabletop games also present accessibility problems for disabled players (for example, wordy and/or complex rules, which can be troublesome for neurodivergent users). Legless in London addresses both representational and accessibility concerns as it provides a balanced, researched-informed, positive, and fun portrayal of disability in an inclusive format.
That consideration for disability also extends to the game's design. It will launch with a smartphone app, providing a digital alternative to the game's physical components including dice rolls, event cards, health tracker, and in-game money.
As for the physical components, the game will ship with large accessible font text, screen reader-friendly resources, easy-read rules, and more.
Legless in London will launch in February 2025.
