Legless in London

Legless in London represents disability in a nuanced way as all players play as a Victorian amputee faced with challenges, opportunities, and choices. Players navigate Victorian London, the workplace, the marriage market, property ownership, medicine, and the prosthesis market while aiming to achieve their character's personal goals. The playable characters are inspired by Victorian amputees and the imagined prosthesis users from nineteenth-century literature. Think Silas Wegg, Captain Ahab, and William Ernest Henley! Through the medium of fun, Legless in London encourages players to think about: the agency, opportunities, and barriers that disabled people had in the past and have today; and how disabled people were and are represented in popular culture.

Focus Games have been collaborating with Dr Ryan Sweet (Senior Lecturer in Humanities, Swansea University) and a focus group of members of the disabled community to create Legless in London, our new tabletop role-playing game, inspired by Ryan’s 2022 open-access book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Disability and disability history are underrepresented in culture—and especially in tabletop gaming. Furthermore, many mainstream tabletop games present accessibility problems for disabled players (for example, wordy and/or complex rules, which can be troublesome for neurodivergent users). Legless in London attempts to address both representational and accessibility issues.

Accessibility features

The Legless in London app offers a digital alternative to many of the physical game components:

• Dice
• Money
• Health Tracker
• Street Event cards

Each player in a group can use the digital or physical version to suit their own needs.

As a game about disability, we wanted to make sure accessibility was carefully considered, so we liaised closely with a focus group of members of the disabled community (including the organisation Disability Arts Cymru) through the design and development process. As a result of these conversations, Legless in London’s accessibility features include:

• Large accessible fonts
• Dexterity-tested components
• Dual-point differentiation
• Low-clutter designs
• Easy Read rules
• Screen reader friendly resources on the website