As such, knowing the arrangement of the vault is constantly complicated by the presence and removal of threats. These threats are indicated by transparent cards being overlaid on top of spaces in the room. More than this, individual spaces will become ‘corrupted’ by threats, meaning that they can’t be used until the threat is dealt with. The offering of cards is quite small though – only three – and as such it’s verbalizable even if the cards can be quite information dense due to the way special abilities work. The top floor will always be the same, but everything else is up for grabs based on card availability. Vault information is provided only visually, and since the vault is constructed by player actions it doesn’t have a learnable layout in the traditional sense. We strongly recommend Fallout Shelter in this category. The board itself, or rather the card tableau, has no information that is represented solely through colours and as such there’s nothing to prohibit a colour blind player engaging with the game. All you really need to know is which spaces are free and how many workers you have left to place. That said, it’s not actually a major issue here because of a well chosen colour palette, along with the fact that it doesn’t often matter who has occupied a space.

Here, it’s because each of the miniatures represents a different SPECIAL aspect, but it’s still something of a shame as it’s a great accessibility aid for players to be able to identify ownership of a piece by its look as well as its colour. Colour Blindnessįallout Shelter shares an interesting feature with Inis in that there are loads of different miniature moulds but they get scattered between players rather than having a form factor that is specifically linked to a a particular individual.

So let’s dig deep and hope we don’t hit a rich vein of radroaches.

What’s more useful is information on whether you can play it. Still, you shouldn’t let us put you off if you fancy playing it. It just feels like it was put together by people that understand the semiotics of the setting but have never really grasped its larger themes. It’s a perfectly okay game – three stars of okay – but it feels like such a missed opportunity when far more exciting usages of the licence would have yielded much more spectacular results. Fallout Shelter is about as shallow an implementation of the franchise as you can get and still meaningfully be worth the description.

Fallout shelter special