The Material Color Wheel

Hues and Cues uses "hue" conceptually in its title but deliberately avoids technical HSL color notation in gameplay. Despite its designer, Scott Brady's two-decade background in specialty printing and color-matching systems, the game employs natural language and perceptual color communication rather than technical color theory.

The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair explores the physical, historical, and cultural origins of colours through their material sources — from crushed insects for carmine red to ground lapis lazuli for ultramarine blue. Unlike the abstract digital world of HSL values where colours exist as pure mathematical coordinates, St Clair reveals how each pigment has a tangible story rooted in geography, chemistry, and human labor. The book demonstrates that colours aren't just visual experiences but material substances with weight, texture, and scarcity — harvested, mined, synthesized, and traded across centuries. Where a screen displays hsl(0, 100%, 50%) with a click, St Clair shows us the alchemists, miners, and merchants who risked their lives to create that same red such as cochineal.

Can we map the material colours from The Secret Lives of Colour onto the conceptual colour names in Hues and Cues? If cochineal produces a specific red hue, does knowing its HSL value help us win the game by better identifying "scarlet" or "crimson" on the board? Or does the game deliberately resist such systematic mapping, relying instead on shared cultural intuition and linguistic consensus about what colors mean? This question explores whether technical color knowledge translates to gameplay advantage, or whether the two systems remain fundamentally incompatible.

Does blue even exist in nature, or is it more a virtual colour — an optical illusion we've learned to perceive? Unlike red and yellow pigments that arise directly from chemical compounds, true blue pigments are remarkably rare in the natural world. This scarcity stems from chemistry itself: creating stable blue molecules is extraordinarily difficult, requiring specific molecular structures that nature seldom produces.

Most blue we encounter in nature isn't actually blue at all — it's an elaborate trick of light. Butterfly wings shimmer blue not from pigment but from microscopic structures that scatter light waves, separating blue wavelengths from the rest of the spectrum. Bluebells achieve their blue color through anthocyanin pigments—the same compounds that appear red or purple in other plants—but stabilized through complex chemical modifications involving aromatic acylation and metal ion interactions that shift the color toward blue. Even the sky and ocean owe their azure hues to light scattering rather than any blue substance. In this sense, much of blue in nature is an optical phenomenon — a color we see but that rarely exists as a tangible pigment

Yet rare exceptions do exist. Blue starfish produce genuine blue pigment called linckiacyanin, combined with yellow carotenoids, making them one of very few creatures with true blue coloration. Even more exceptionally, the obrina olivewing butterfly stands alone as the only known animal species that produces a true blue pigment called pterobilin. These genuine blues are so uncommon that when humans sought blue for art and decoration, they turned to equally rare minerals like lapis lazuli or laboriously extracted indigo from plants. The difficulty of creating blue — both chemically in nature and historically for human use — makes it perhaps the most elusive of all colors: omnipresent in our visual experience yet vanishingly scarce as actual matter.