Zendo

[cellio]

We had a fun evening playing Zendo. Oh, so that's who demonlurking and wanderingpixie are! The net is funny sometimes. :-)

We had eight different colors of pieces and still found ourselves having to recycle to get the pieces we wanted. It's way too easy to develop superstitions about size+color.

I didn't get to try my hand at being master. Maybe next time. This was only, I think, the third time I've played the game.

Comments

[lyev.livejournal.com]

Glad you had fun too. I think I benefitted far too much from being behind either you or Dani in the seating order, and having your guesses before I went!

It seems there are two meta-tactics in this game:
1. Developing a rule that's not "too hard"
2. Being able to develop a guess just so that the Master has to disprove it (and give you more info for the rest of your guesses)

Now of course I can't wait to play again :-)

[cellio]

It seems there are two meta-tactics in this game:

I agree. We were doing a fair bit of "well, prove it" guesses last night; I hadn't seen so much of that in my (limited) previous experience.

Coming up with a rule that's at the right level of difficulty seems an interesting challenge for the master. Maybe next time I'll get to try that out. I'd definitely like to play more.

[magid.livejournal.com]

It's slightly inactive now, but there is a zendo community on LJ; you could use old posts there as zendo puzzles, if you'd like.

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

Yup and yup. That's the trick - make it fun, make it interesting, make people think - don't get pieces thrown at you in frustration ;)

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

I'm still amused my rule came from trying to figure out lyev's wacky rule. And it did manage to avoid the "running out of colors" problem. Heh.

I'm actually pretty used to getting the master to reveal information with counterexamples, because often I know I feel like I'm fishing in the dark. They may give away more than they realize because they're concentrating on the example in question, and not obfuscating the rule as much.

[lyev.livejournal.com]

I'm still amused my rule came from trying to figure out lyev's wacky rule.

Hehehe, in retrospect I shouldn't have made that so hard. I think every "AND" in the rule squares the difficulty ;-)

And words like "square root", "prime factor" and "fibonacci sequence" should be banned from all rules!

[cellio]

And words like "square root", "prime factor" and "fibonacci sequence" should be banned from all rules!

I once used "primary colors" in a rule, and it was too hard. I think square roots et al are right out. :-)

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

You will be unsurprised to discover that I have often been accused of being a PCB. Not as often as blackpaladin, but that's not saying much. montuos is, OTOH, a color wheelie.

[cellio]

PCB? Sorry, I'm new to the game; I don't know the jargon.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry; I'd thought that the term would have popped up during the game since I got it from various Pgh'ers. PCB stands for Pip-Counting Bastard.