About us
Our journey
In 2011 we left Venezuela and moved to Bonaire. It was a bittersweet moment, we left our whole life, family, and friends behind, but we felt the country could no longer provide a safe harbor for our daughters and our dreams. Leaving your country behind creates a hole in your soul, but it also gives you the opportunity to reinvent yourself.
There are many places we did not visit when living back in our home country, many experiences that we postponed. “There is always time” we thought. We were wrong, we took it for granted.
But every downside has an upside if you look for it. We decided not to take our new home for granted and we started learning about Bonaire. You cannot love what you don’t know, and the more we learned about this beautiful island the more we loved it.
We wanted to make sure our daughters learned about Bonaire but in a fun and engaging manner, and that drove us to start creating our board games and puzzles.
Our girls loved the game, and then their friends did, and their friends’ friends. And now here we are, you are reading this, and we are making board games and puzzles to help you learn about the place you are at, finding the wonders around you, and having fun.
Our calling
We aim to make the world better through play. We help people have fun together, away from the screens and learn something at the same time. We believe every place has something to be proud, something wonderful and worth sharing with the rest of the world. We love it when you, the player, create memorable experiences with our board games and puzzles. Let’s play a better world.
Our story so far
2017 Vanessa creates WANIKA EZ to enable her business as part time professional singer and plastic artist.
Fernando starts working in our first 2 board games: Reef Revenge and Saviors of Kimeria.
2018 The singing business is doing well enough to become a full time job. WANIKA EZ becomes WANIKA BV.
Saviors of Kimeria is fully developed and tested, we even found a sponsors and 2 angel investors.
2019 We developed our board game Rincon ta On and our line of puzzles with art by Vanessa and by Fernando´s late dad.
We started selling Saviors of Kimeria, our first ever published board game.
2020 We developed the coloring / mask book “I create my own Bonaerian Masks”.
We participated in the first ever edition of Present Your Startup on Bonaire. Our pitch of the board game NAVITA BONAIRE got us first place and we started developing this game and planning an international expansion.
Our team
Fernando NavaGame design
He dreams games, quite frequently in fact. He comes up with the initial ideas, themes and mechanics. He is brave enough to share them and let feedback improve on them.
Vanessa PeraltaVisual arts
She makes the games happen; keeps the company running and help us going back to our happy places when we hit a wall. We cannot find anything without her.
Mafer NavaMarketing
She translates WANIKA’s ideas from “Geek-Parent” to “Cool Young People”. She holds no punches, tells it as it is, and makes us a better team and business.
Agata NavaGame testing
She is part of the inspiration. She is very smart but also quick to be wondered by new information and experiences, she helps designing and testing the games.
Amanda NavaGame testing
She is also part of the inspiration but her real superpower is joy, she will find something wonderful in everyday things and keep our smiles up.
Giordano CasanovaGraphic designer
He is an amazing illustrator and designer, his ability to translate the game descriptions into art pieces is incredible, he can paint the game we dream better than we ever dreamed it.
