Legless in London

Experience life as a lower-limb amputee in Victorian London! Achieve your goals as you navigate the streets, negotiate the job market, find love, buy property, and use artificial legs. Will you prioritise making your riches in the Stock Exchange or achieving your personal goal at the Country Estate? You decide in this role-and-move strategy game inspired by Ryan Sweet’s 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Player experiences

“Legless in London is a game you could easily become immersed in and have a lot of fun…. It’s well thought through with an array of characters.” – Jon

“Great game… Makes talking about disability & its effect (modern & historical) easier & less taboo.” – Mat

“Very accessible for those with ADHD with short-term goals in sequence. Street events are really fun too!” – Maddy

“Really cool board game! Great way of teaching about the experiences of disabled people in history.” – Callum

“Loved the ease in which a complete novice can pick up the game.” – Sam

“Fun game – loved the story element and the characters.” – Iola

Step Back in Time...

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.

This game was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/X00354X/1, AH/Z506485/1].

Legless in London is the result of a collaboration between Focus Games and Dr Ryan Sweet (Senior Lecturer in Humanities, Swansea University), and 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.

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 this website (linked to physical cards via QR codes in the game)