Ascension: Accessibility Winner

Aaron Cecchini-Butler
3 min readAug 30, 2018

Ascension is a deck-building game. It involves starting with a few cards, buying cards or defeating monsters, and slowly building your deck. Over time you “banish” bad cards to raise the average value of cards in your deck. You play against an opponent, and attempt to collect more “honor” than them.

It is a well-designed game, but more interestingly, it is an extremely well-designed app.

Ascension carries the torch of accessibility, not only for the new user of the application but also for people with various needs.

First of all, on a basic level, playable cards are lit up with a border.

The four apprentices and the militia are lit with a white border because they are currently playable.

Additionally, different color borders indicate different possibilities.

The green borders indicate the ability to purchase that card.
The red border indicates the ability to defeat that monster.

Using color as an indicator is only accessible if it is also backed up by another way to tell the options (in the case of colorblindness).

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Aaron Cecchini-Butler
Aaron Cecchini-Butler

Written by Aaron Cecchini-Butler

Senior Systems Designer at Grubhub working on Cookbook (our design system) — as well as contributing to product design work.

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