Designer: たきざわ まさかず（Masakazu Takizawa）
Artist: 井上 磨（Osamu Inoue）
Publisher: こぐま工房（Koguma Koubou）
Players: 1-5
Ages: 9+
Playing Time: 10-45 minutes
Times Played: 7 with a friend’s purchased copy.
Availability: The copy I have I bought from booth.pm. At the time of this review, copies are available (or should be soon) from Big Cat Games in the US.
Here’s something: it’s an anatomical structure from a carp. A sort of growth off of a vertebrae that connects the swim bladder to the, uh, inner ear. But here’s what it does. The fish gets to use the swim bladder as an echo chamber. It amplifies what the fish can “hear” through the water. It doesn’t do much good to hear things in your swim bladder, but luckily this “Weberian Apparatus” makes a shortcut to the ear.
By David Starr Jordan – Jordan, David Starr (1907) Fishes, New York City, NY: Henry Holt and Company, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42648212
That’s not the thing Ernst Heinrich Weber was known to me for. He wasn’t known to me at all until I started reading about the Weber-Fechner Law to prepare for this review. I only knew about what the law relates to, and that’s how we’re getting to Hikotrune shortly: just noticeable difference.
It’s one of those terms that tells you what it means. If I turn up the volume on some music, shrink your ice cream pint, crank down the AC (whichever direction that is), when will you notice? What is the smallest amount of change before you notice? It’s the just noticeable difference.
Hiktorune turns haptic just noticeable difference into a fantasy quest.
