 So, we were at a board game night, nerd NYC, Scott got there a little bit before me, and when I arrived, he was playing a game, and I just want to say that if you don't know what this game is, and you see some people playing it, it looks ridiculous in terms of complexity. Right, so you have all these different colored pyramids of different shapes and sizes, and I had seen these pyramids at game stores in the past. There were millennium, and they were always, like, stupidly expensive for giant packs of them. Pretty much every game store in the world I've ever been to sells these little pyramids, and in the little, you know, package of pyramids is like a little piece of paper, and it has some game in it. And I'm like, eh, whatever. You know, it's usually next to some, like, random dice games. Well, some games, usually it has, like, a whole ton of games in them, because they're the ice house pieces, or the lab's pyramids. That's what they're known as is ice house pieces, and there's all kinds of games you can play with them, and if you go online, you can download, like, these packages that are like these books that is like a hundred ice house games, right? All these games you can play with ice house pieces. They're just pawns to use to make games. Yeah, it's, you know, and the thing is, because they're pyramids, because they come in multiple colors in multiple sizes, there's a lot you can do with them, you know, and they stack. So the stacking factor adds even more that you can do with them. Scott, we should use them in Burning Wheel as our arta. You can do that. But anyway. This game that we played, you know, was called Zendo, right? And apparently, I don't know, I obviously only know one game that you can play with ice house pieces. I read all the other rules for a whole bunch of other games. I already am of the opinion, even after knowing the rules to zero other ice house games, that this is the best ice house game. Having read the rules for like 10 ice house games, they're pretty shit by and large. Right, but anyway, so to explain Zendo, I first got to explain Mastermind, right? So Mastermind is this game, it's really old. It's actually I think an American game, and it's a code breaking game. One person comes up with a code and the code is just colors in order. So the code could be like red, green, blue, yellow. Scott, it was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Merowitz in Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. Awesome. But it's based on an earlier game called Bulls and Cows. That's at least more than a century old. Thank you for reading Wikipedia. Uh huh. That's my job. Mastermind works is that one person puts the code in there and the other person is to figure out the code. So it's sort of a versus game. It's like, can you come up with a pattern that I can't figure out in some number of tries? It's one on one. And what you do is you make a guess. So you have a whole bunch of pieces and you put out a guess. And if your thing matches the other guy's thing, he's like, yeah, it matches. If it doesn't match, he's like, no, it doesn't match. And you got to keep trying. And based on the clues you get from his answers, right, you keep going. Like, you'll know that has two correct in that one and that one has one correct, which means that that one is definitely green in the second slot. So I used to play this game a lot as a kid. And now that I know game theory and I look back at it, it seems pretty solvable. And you know what? Just looking at Wikipedia, there are algorithms that you can just always solve it in six guesses. Right. Because it's trivially easy to solve it in some number of guesses because there's only, I think, four colors, right? But there's one, two, three. There's four slots and a number of colors. Right. But yeah, mathematically, it's like you can always get it four pegs, six colors. There is a six guess algorithm and a five guess algorithm. Wow. That's good. Anyway, so I played this game as a kid and we actually had mastermind for kids. And I got to say mastermind for kids. If you're going to buy a copy of mastermind, don't get the regular old boring mastermind. Get mastermind for kids because it is the same exact game. It is not modified in any way. It is abs. It's not like when they make monopoly junior and it's dumb ass monopoly, right? Or a cluck junior, which was similar to clue and actually kind of better in some ways, but still dumb ass clue. What exactly is it called? Because I have a list here of all the variations and re-releases mastermind for kids. The reason to get mastermind for kids is because the same exact game, no, it only has three holes, not four, like real mastermind. No, I remember the one Wikipedia says you're wrong. My memory must be wrong. But I remember having four holes. I'm glad. Oh, I said the words Wikipedia says you're wrong and your immediate response was, well, my memory must be wrong. Not Wikipedia. Really? Some guy on the internet. I remember there being four colors. I'm going to look it up. Four holes. Anyway, the reason that I thought it was better if it is indeed the same game is because three holes. It has a style to it, right? It's not elephants and hippos and lions. That's right. It's not just like a dick. It's not with a gland. That's right. It is a penis. It's not just boring colors. It's like animal monkey hippo, right? And it has a style to it. Scott, this game's a dick. This is why you like it. Look at this. Look at this game. Anyway. That's the version we had. I remember it having four holes. Scott, I got to read this to you because the five-guess algorithm is really simple. Yep. Create a set S of the remaining possibilities. Now there are only 1296 anyway. So pick anything, right? The first guess is AABB. Remove all possibilities from S that would not give the same score of colored and white pegs if they were the answer. For each possible guess that remains, not necessarily in S. Okay. So for each possible guess, calculate how many possibilities from S would be eliminated for each possible colored white score. This is not trivial to do in your brain. All right. So there is another algorithm. I'm not going to read the whole thing that you can do in your brain. That's the six guess. Yes. Six guesses in the brain. Five guesses if you're a rain man. Or a computer. One guess if your moms were in glasses and you can see the reflection. Oh yes. Oh yes. Anyway. I thought I was so clever. I thought my parents would be like, he's a genius. No. They were like, you must have cheated. My sister mind is the other guy picks something and it's like you, it's like 20 questions, right? It's like you slowly get more information as you guess, leading up towards guessing the correct answer the other guy's thought up or failing to do so in the given number of guesses and then losing. So Zendo is the same thing, but slightly different and way better. The way it works is this. One person is the game runner and they come up with something or they look in the book and pick something, right? And there's different levels of difficulty. That is the Buddha nature. Now there's this whole, you know, the guy who taught it to us and played it with us, there's this whole sort of meta game of people who run it a lot, aren't supposed to say, like, what constitutes the levels or anything and you kind of figure that out. Like, so the cone master will say something like, this is a level three. Yeah. They don't have to tell you what level difficulty it is or not, right? But anyway, so every cone has different properties, right? It has its size, it has its color, it has number of pips on the side of it, which corresponds to the size. It does. So a big one has three pips and a small one has one pip and a medium one is two pips. It can also be laying on its side, which means, and because the pyramid, even though it's laying on its side, it could be pointing in different directions. It could be not on the table if it is stacked on another pyramid. Yup. It could be pointing at a pyramid. It could be covered by a pyramid if one is stacked on top of it. It could be covered by two pyramids. It could be pointed at another pyramid that itself is not touching the table. So what happens is at the very beginning of the game, the game runner, the master, right, and everyone else is a student and the game runner is the master, decides on what is the Buddha nature. So the Buddha nature could be something like, at least one pyramid is green. So they would produce a set of pyramids in some configuration that is the Buddha nature, meaning there is at least one green pyramid in it, and they would put next to it a gem signifying that that set has the Buddha nature. Typically a white stone. Yes. Then they will produce another set using any number of pyramids in any configuration that does not have the Buddha nature. So in this example case, there would be no green pyramids in that set whatsoever. Then player one, and this is where it gets better than mastermind because you can have a lot of players guessing, right, in a round. Player one produces a set of pyramids and lays them out. And then he has two choices. You can either say student or master. If he says students, yeah, we'll do master first. If he says master, the master will then place a stone next to that set signifying whether that set does or does not have the Buddha nature. Now it's very the best way to play this is to kind of get in the theme a little bit and be very formal like master. Why is master does this set? Not even just people reading around the internet. People usually just say the word master and then the master will silently place the white or the black stone and that is the only interaction. That's good. But anyway, then after doing so, right, because you would never, you could do before doing so, but there's no reason to because you can always get the free guess. You can use your guessing stone. How many guessing stones everyone gets? Everyone starts with, I believe, one or two. One or two. You have a guessing stone. There's rules online. If you use the guessing stone, you would guess at the Buddha nature. So if you put your guessing stone, you could say the Buddha nature is at least two greens or if and only if the number of blue pieces touching at least one green piece is odd. Yeah, it could be or the number of pips on all the pyramids combined is a prime number. Right? You know, or the, you know, the square of all the pips combined is, you know, larger than a hundred, something like that. And then, you know, what would happen is A, either you would win because you guessed correctly or B, the master would then produce a set of pyramids that is contradictory to the thing you just said. So either it is an example that breaks your rule but still gets a white stone because it has the Buddha nature or something that does not have the Buddha nature, but that perfectly meets your rule. Now this is why this game is so fascinating. You can't cheat as the master because that will become immediately apparent to the students because everything has to be consistent. And if you come up with a rule for the Buddha nature and a student comes up with an equivalent rule, the master, that counts because the master is unable to refute the rule even though it's worded differently. So it gets you out of that sort of fiddly wording problem because at its core, it's inductive reasoning. Right. So, you know, for example, let's say the Buddha nature was, you know, I don't know. There are no red pieces. There are no red pieces, right? And the other guy says there are only pieces that are blue, green, black or yellow, right? Well, obviously those are equivalent rules. Here's a more side long example. My guess for the there are no red pieces is there are no pyramids pointing at a red piece. That is an equivalent rule because how is the master going to refute that? There are no pyramids pointing at a red piece. You know, I guess, yeah, so it's, you know, you come up with pretty much the same rule, you know, or an equivalent rule that a contradictory example could not be produced. Anyway, so you go around the table and you make, you know, you play and if you want to use your guessing stone, you can guess. But if you fail at guessing, you lost your guessing stone and now you can't guess again. So if you figure out the answer and you don't have a guessing stone, you're fucked. So Scott, how does one get more guessing stones? Well, instead of choosing master, you choose students. So you produce your set for free at the beginning of your turn and you say students. And then everyone puts out a hand with a black or white stone. Everyone puts out a sealed hand and in that sealed hand is a black or a white stone. And guess, and it's a guess, every student guesses whether the, you know, set you just produced exhibits the Buddha nature or not. If they guess correctly, they receive a guessing stone. If they guess wrongly, they don't receive a guessing stone. But this can be a little dangerous because you're giving everyone else the opportunity. For example, say someone else is closer than you. You might give them a guessing stone because they guess better. And in fact, if you're closer, the odds of guessing correctly and getting the guessing stone when someone chooses students are much higher. Now, the other thing is, this is where it gets interesting. You might notice that someone else, the shapes they made or the cones they made on their turn, seem to be testing certain things and they guess right on a couple of students in a row. You could figure out that they're clearly on the right track and look at what they were constructing and asking the master. So you're interacting with the other players and their tests. For example, you might be close. You might not want to do a certain test because it tips your hand if you think that you're on the right path and no one else is. You don't want to do a test that makes it obvious you're testing color, for example. So the game gets really interesting in that level. But in the end, it's just pattern recognition. Yeah, it's pretty much, it's the same game as Mastermind, only multiplayer and much more complex because there are so many more factors that go into it. Now, usually people play with a set of ground rules. Like if you make a guess, like there are only blue pieces next to yellow pieces, if, whatever, whatever, whatever, there's a thousand qualifiers. The master can be like, that's ridiculous. I'm not even going to take a stone. Yeah, and the thing is the master isn't going to choose something for the Buddha nature that is so complicated, right? He could, but only if all the players are on that level or are really willing to deal with that. Yeah, who's going to be a jerk and be like, yeah, the Buddha nature is at least one blue pointing at a yellow, at least one yellow pointing at a green, at least one thing somewhere that's stacked, at least two pyramids laying down and all the pips add up to an odd number and there's no greens. It's like, there are no situational conditions like the player, you know, who the player is or what time it is or anything. It's just the pieces. Yeah, that would be absolute bullshit, right? And in fact, most people... Because you have to be able to look at all the sets that are out on the table as examples, right? As you play, you know, just like in Mastermind, every set you play stays out on the table and thus you start to run out of expensive pyramids. Now, more importantly, the way people play this game too is you can use anything. You could use just any random assortment of bits as long as they're reasonably consistent with one another. And you define the ground rules ahead of time when you're playing with a given group as to what is and is not a state as far as the game. For example, when we were playing, you could put a pyramid pointing at another pyramid, but it did not matter where it was pointing, only that it was pointing at the pyramid or at no pyramid. Yeah, or it didn't matter what direction it was pointing either. Yes, and you could not put a pyramid inside of a pyramid. There was pointing at, not pointing at, on the table, not on the table, laying down, standing up. But there was no, like, a small pyramid inside of a big pyramid was the same as a small pyramid pointing at a big pyramid. Before the game, we decided what was gonna be a factor. Like, let's say you could have a game where you said, listen, the only things that are gonna be a factor in this game are color and size. Nothing else matters, right? So it's like, oh, so arrangement doesn't matter. No, so green, green, blue is the same as green, blue, green, if they're all the same size, right? But, you know, medium, green, medium, blue, big, green is different than medium, blue, medium, green, medium, yellow, right? Because color and size matter, but nothing else. Yep, so because the order didn't matter, order only mattered if things were pointing, and then it was just what's pointing at what. Right, so you determine before you start which factors come into play so you can, you know, limit the set of things you have to test for when deciphering the code. And yet, this is crazy fun because, you know, everyone's sitting there racking their brain, going, what could it be, what could it be? And you try something you think is clever and then you think it's the Buddha nature and it's not, or you think it is, or you think it's not, and it is. We had a really, really good master, too. He's obviously played this game a lot. He invested in these fucking expensive pieces of plastic. I tried to buy them online. So the cheapest way to get them in bulk. That we can find. I did a lot of research. You couldn't find used ones on eBay or? Yeah, I didn't find anything like that. Also, I realized in my whole life, you know, I've been on stuff on eBay. I've never actually bought a thing on eBay. I've actually bought quite a, ever. A nice bunch of stuff on eBay. In my entire life. But I will link to, there's a game called Ice Dice and it comes with a total of 30 of these pyramids and costs about $15 to $17. That's not 30 sets of pyramids. That's 30 pyramids. The sets of pyramids themselves cost twice as much per pyramid. So you're best off buying this crappy Ice Dice game and you get a big bag and all these pieces and some weird dice. So when I say a set of pyramids, I mean one red, one small red, one medium red, one big, all the same color. That's a set, right? So how many colors are there? Well, there are different, we play with five colors, I believe. But there are other sets of colors. And I didn't get those, like there's a Xeno set and notice how some of the advanced cones have the idea of a quote, strange piece. This game can have as many dimensions of buddiness as you desire. But between five colors, right? You know, red, green, blue, yellow, black, I think are the colors, right? Three pyramids each. So that's five times three is 15. That's 15 pyramids. If you buy a copy of Ice Dice, you get two blacks of each size, two reds of each size, two yellows of each size. It's not a lot of pyramids. You need to spend, it's crazy money to get a lot of these pyramids. But if you think about it, it's like, okay, you don't really need the pyramids. You could make these, you could do whatever. But you want the pyramids. You want the pyramids. And two, even though there's seemingly crazy overpriced and stupid and Zendo seems to be the only good game we've discovered to play with them yet, there are a bajillion games you can play with these and they're just really useful gaming pieces in general. So it's sort of worth it if you heavily utilize them in gaming frequently and try to play all these games with them or come up with games with them. It is very telling. They're such versatile game pieces and they don't serve the same uses as dice or generic pawns or other gaming pieces. So they're unique. That it's sort of worth having at least some of them if you're not gonna buy a ton of them. The telling factor as to why I think this game was good is that we were playing it for a while and one, people kept coming up and staring at it and you could see them, especially if you're playing like master and then a stone comes out. Students, stones come out. This game is incomprehensible to outsiders and it looks fascinating and complicated. But two, we just kept playing it. And at one point we're like, hey, should we play something else? Everyone kind of sat there. No, let's just keep playing this. We played it for a while. But the other thing that you can do is it's up to the master sort of, even though the master has no stake in the winning or losing, it's up to them in determining the difficulty. The master could purposefully try to throw you off. Like let's say- Our master did this really well. He gave what is possibly the most unhelpful set of initial examples possible. Right, so let's say we determine that stacking, color, size, laying down and number of pips are all gonna be factors, right? But the actual Buddha nature is no mediums, right? So I lay out something with no mediums. It's got guys laying down and pointing every which way and stacking and whatever. And I say that has the Buddha nature and then I lay another one down. It's just one medium by itself. It has a medium. Well, that might be too obvious. So it's a medium and a bunch of other pieces in a different configuration. It's a medium and a whole mess of stuff. And I say that does have the Buddha nature and be a little like, whoa, you know? It's like I purposefully try to throw you off by putting all this extra information in there and you're gonna have to over time sort of figure out based on what does and doesn't have the Buddha nature that, oh, stacking doesn't matter in this one, even though, you know, we didn't say it beforehand. So you had to figure it out in game, extending the game. And if the game gets really long, you either have to remove some of the sets from the table to use the pieces or buy a lot of pieces. So to play a really complex, difficult, incredibly high level game of the Zendo, you need a lot of expensive pieces. I ordered three sets of the ice dice, which was like 45 bucks or so. Yeah, it's a lot. You could have gotten a real board game for that money. The thing is, I think I'm gonna order a few more sets of it just because these pieces will be useful last me forever. And it is very fun to be the master. You can see the kinds of people who like to run this. This is a game. You can go to PAX and you will gather a gigantic crowd who will want to play this game trivially. And you could even come up with some variants, right? Cause these play any game, right? You come up with variants where like, you know, people could come up to the table, make a guess and leave. And like, you just, people keep coming up, getting a line. And when you get to the front of the line, it's your turn. It's just a crazy long line. And then whoever gets it wins. And the table just keeps filling up with more and more pieces. But since everyone's in line, they don't see it till they get up there. And like maybe they have 30 seconds to do something, you know? Anyway, you could come up with a lot of fun stuff to do. It's a super fun game. I highly recommend it, but it's expensive. So trick one of your friends into buying the pieces and running it for you. Or maybe find some other sort of pieces that have an equal number of factors that you can play the same game. I mean, you could do this with like dice. Sort of. You need colored dice. If you had a giant bag of D&D dice and you agreed that color didn't matter, you could play this game. Yeah. Or maybe color doesn't matter. You have a whole bunch of D. I say color doesn't matter because usually you have a bunch of different colored dice. Right, but you could go out and buy. Like the thing is dice end up being more expensive than ice house pieces. Yes, and it's not like the old days where I really needed 40 different D20s. I know, right? Because the first one wasn't lucky enough. No, I just need a sack of D6s. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott. 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