I read the history first, and then looked at the game at OP's link.
I was actually a little disappointed in the loss of the Buddhist terminology. Master, koan, mondo, etc. They've been replaced with "Moderator", "exam" etc.
While I understand the reasoning (unfamiliar words will turn people off, also there's a smattering of cultural appropriation), moderator and exam seem so... sterile.
Great piece. Game design is such a fun topic for me. I was frustrated at the strange incentives in the default rules for the game "Bananagrams" so I've been doing some thinking about how to improve it. This story has confirmed something I already suspected - I'm not going to get far without trying out new rules in a real game!
Amazing game with the right group of people. When I was in grad school for math, my friends and I would get a pitcher of beer (or two, or three) and play Zendo for hours.
I tried bringing it to a company game night recently, and it was not super well received. A colleague of mine described it as, "less a game and more a way to slowly melt your mind".
I had a great time playing Zendo at a Perl conference, using a set of red, yellow, and blue Legos instead of pyramids. It’s a nice tactile thing to play with and build. Playing with programmers is fun, some of the guesses for the rule were long strings of conditionals — and incorrect, but being programmers this is the kind of logic we do all day.
Trying the game with my local gaming group was… not successful. If we were into harder games, maybe it would have gone over better.
A favorite of mine; back when I frequented a lot of software conventions I would bring my set and those odd, colorful pyramids would always draw some attention.
You can tell the difference between developers who play this game, as opposed to more "ordinary" people in that they approach the game differently. Developers come up with rules like "The sum of the pips pointing at other pieces is even." A new player in the latter group came up with one of my favorite Koans of all time: "One piece is highest."
I once made the mistake of doing something like ‘viewed as a binary representation of a number, where pyramids on their side are zeros and those standing are ones, such that the number is odd.”
After that my friends wouldn’t play Zendo with me.
With the "functionally equivalent" rule (i.e. if the wording is different, but the Master can't find a counterexample, the guess is correct) this might not be too hard to find.
Used to keep a small collection of lego 1×1, 1×2 and 2×2 bricks in each of 4 colours as a homebrew version; you can order custom sets like that online.
Also noteworthy: The pyramids used in Zendo are used in many of Looney Labs other games. I especially liked "Homeworlds"
(https://www.looneylabs.com/games/homeworlds) which imho does have the potential
to be "Chess ... IN SPACE".
Also, fun to note that the modern Zendo set like the link here includes "friends" for the pyramids: wedges (like doorstops or slices of pie/cheese) and blocks. While the pyramids are very cool and have nearly a million different games and sets, having more shapes is also really cool and so far Zendo is the only Looney Labs game with the extra shapes to be "friends" with the pyramids.
I played this game once at a friend's house and I've adopted it into a version I play with my chemistry students before I hand them an assignment about experiment design.
It's very elegant and I think it leaves a mark on them, you get to watch all our little cognitive biases bubble up realtime
it's reasonably hard because it takes an experienced player to not inadvertently make up rules that seem simple in their head but are actually super hard to guess. but if you do have that experience then the game is pretty accessible to kids, and should certainly appeal to mastermind fans.
Just tried this with my 5 and 7 year old and they loved it. We used wooden block toys
Both felt a little confused but after a round or two they were coming up with their own crazy secrets like "has a green piece pointing at the door". Going to look for Pyramid Arcade in the UK.
Inductive here meaning going from specific to general. I've never played the game, but it seems like you start with a specific example of the rule and try to generalize its definition. So in that sense, it's a little like pattern matching. "Proof by induction" is a proof technique where you prove that if something holds for n, then it also holds for n+1. That doesn't seem related to this game, but the game might help with your pattern matching abilities.
> "Proof by induction" is a proof technique where you prove that if something holds for n, then it also holds for n+1.
Proof by induction is actually a little more general than that.
The idea of induction is that if:
(1) you start with an object that has some property;
(2) you modify it by a series of steps; and
(3) all modification steps preserve this property
then whatever object you end up with will also exhibit the property in question. The style of induction you're talking about modifies small numbers into larger numbers by the process of adding 1; in order to prove that your property holds for all integers larger than whatever your base case is, you also need a theorem that tells you all larger integers can be reached from smaller integers by a process of repeatedly adding 1.[1] (This is true, but it tends to get left out of ordinary induction proofs.)
It is very common to use induction in this more general form when you have a set that is defined as (a) some elements that are in the set by definition, plus (b) some elements that are in the set by virtue of a membership rule [which usually takes the form "if x is in the set, then f(x) is also in the set"]. If you can prove that all of the base elements [from step (a)] have a property, and you can show that every membership rule produces an element that shares that property, then you have shown that every member of the set has the property. As an example, we can define the Fibonacci sequence this way:
1. The ordered triple (0, 0, 1) is in the set.
2. If (a, b, c) is in the set, then so is (a+1, c, b+c)
Now every Fibonacci number F_n is the second element of the triple in the set whose first element is n. [Theorem: for any n >= 0, there is exactly one such element.] You can do induction on the Fibonacci numbers by proving things about the three dimensional map f(a, b, c) = (a+1, c, b+c).
(You could also do induction on the more fundamental Fibonacci map f(a,b) = (b, a+b), but then you'd lose the ability to refer to the index of the Fibonacci number.)
[1] Note: it's not necessary that there be no other way to reach your target element. As long as you can get from base case to target by using only steps that preserve the property, the target will have the property. If there's another path, using other steps, that doesn't necessarily preserve the property at every intermediate step, that doesn't matter.
>> The style of induction you're talking about modifies small numbers into larger numbers by the process of adding 1; in order to prove that your property holds for all integers larger than whatever your base case is, you also need a theorem that tells you all larger integers can be reached from smaller integers by a process of repeatedly adding 1.
But you get to define what the domain of the problem is; induction is just about functions preserving properties of their input. If your induction proof fails to cover a particular space, it's still a valid induction proof for some subset of the space.
yes, it's a lot of fun for the round master (who is more than just a moderator, they have to come up with the rule themselves). the fun lies in seeing if you can find a good rule - not too complex but also not too easy - and watching people try to get it, or watching them chase red herrings.
Indeed, like Roleplaying GM, this is not about winning. It's much like designing Portal levels. Your goal is that the players should feel smart for figuring out the answer, not that they should feel dumb because they couldn't solve it, nor that it was childishly simple so that they would inevitably stumble on the answer. It's tricky to do well.
Most first time masters choose rules that are too hard. "There are more red than blue pieces but the pieces are valued by size with 1 for smallest and 3 for largest" is too hard for non-expert players to ever figure it out. It feels easier to guess a rule you know than it really will be.
> Most first time masters choose rules that are too hard. "There are more red than blue pieces but the pieces are valued by size with 1 for smallest and 3 for largest" is too hard for non-expert players to ever figure it out.
Well, if you used different values for the pieces it might be, but those specific values are literally marked on the pieces. The rule "there are more red points than blue points" isn't especially challenging.
Not numbers, but at the base of the pyramid you should see one notch on every side for a small one, 2 notches on every side for a medium one, and 3 notches on every side for a large one.
This box set includes cards for rules grouped into Easy/Medium/Hard which makes it even easier on first time moderators.
When I've brought out the set the last few times we all take turns being the moderator and the Rules cards help ease everyone into it, including people that don't think they can do it.
SDG is basically dead afaik ... It still works, but is left to rot away. Signup does not really work anymore and I had to contact the admin to get my new account activated.
