Game: Volo
Designer: Dieter Stein
Publisher: nestorgames
Players: 2
Time: 45 Minutes
Times played: 2 with a purchased copy
Game: Feed the Ducks
Designer: Néstor Romeral Andrés
Publisher: nestorgames
Players: 2-4
Time: 20 Minutes
Times played: 5 (with both mine and a friend’s copy of Yavalath)
Once a month during the brisker times of the year, I spend my Friday nights at a science lecture. It’s a group of retired folks from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, but all of whom are avid and skilled outsider botanists in their retirement. The group’s specialty is wildflowers, but the lectures run a broader gamut, and recently I attended one that focused on the retinal structures of the two forward-facing sets of eyes in certain jumping spiders.
We learned about their culinary and sexual attractions to different colors; their adaptability to changes in these realms; the use of red filtering cells to allow green-detecting retina cells to observe red; their use of muscles to contort their eyes inside their head, so as to adjust their focal point, without turning their head to bely their position; and how the placement of their retina cells counteracts chromatic aberrations.
He also talked about various technologies that have directly and indirectly taken inspiration from discoveries of jumping spider and other animal behaviours.
One thing that must’ve slipped the presenter’s mind is the avian behaviour that has inspired the nestorgames for today, Volo and Feed the Ducks.
I first came across Volo as I was falling down the LUDI rabbit hole and stumbled across Cameron’s Games & Puzzle Design Journal. The articles are refreshing in their academic approach to game critique and theory. Continue reading