Zendo house rules

House rules

Suggested house rules for playing Zendo on the BlogNomic Slack:

• Each Koan is constructed from a string of emoji, and marked with a ⚫ or ⚪ reaction emoji to represent a response stone.
• At the start of the game, the Master announces a list of the emoji which are being used for the game.
• The Master may choose to announce the possibly salient aspects of the emoji ("we are using these four food emoji; the fruit/vegetable aspect and the dominant colour are the only possible significant aspects") or to leave this as something to be worked out by the players ("we are using these five faces; any aspect of the graphic may be significant"). As a baseline, the emoji are simply considered to be distinct symbols. Any named aspects do not have to be used in the rule.
  • In particular, take into notice that Slack does not guarantee Unicode emoji to be rendered with the same art across various implementations, and any details outside the standardized meaning of the emoji may be lost.
• Any spacing between emoji is irrelevant.
• The Master maintains a pinned post listing all koans judged so far, and updates it as the game progresses.
• When a game starts, players may join it by simply playing a move. When the Master announces that the round has ended, the turn order becomes locked in with those players, and repeats for the rest of the game.
• From round 2 onwards, the channel topic lists the players of the game in turn order, and the number of guessing stones they possess, to be kept updated by the Master.
• Players are discouraged from Mondoing during the first round (as it may be the case that not everyone who'll be playing the game has joined yet).
• So that the next player knows whether to take their turn or not: if a player is considering making a guess after their Koan is judged, they must either stay online to respond to it immediately, or announce this possible intention when making the Koan.

Clucky Variant

• Moves can either be a master or a guess. You do not need a guess stone to make a guess
• Players can make their moves in any order, and do not need to wait for the master to respond to a move before taking their turn
• Players who make an incorrect guess lose their next turn

History

Game 1

Available symbols: 🚗🏍️

Master: Zaratustra

Winner: None, game abandoned

Guesses:

Rule: A koan has the Buddha nature if it has more total wheels in the middle than on the ends.

Game 2

Available symbols: 💣🌈🍰

Master: Josh

Winner: Pokes

Guesses:

Rule: A koan has the Buddha nature if it has a 💣 somewhere between two 🌈s.

Game 3

Available symbols: ◀️▶️🔼

Master: Pokes

Winner: Bais

Guesses:

Rule: A koan has the Buddha-nature if there is an overlap between symbols, after each symbol has moved by a unit in the pointed direction. (As guess by Bais) Equivalently: A koan has the Buddha nature if it matches ▶️?◀️ (one of any symbol between arrows).

Game 4

Available symbols: 🟥🔵🟩

Master: NotAJumbleOfNumbers

Winner: Kevan

Guesses:

Rule: A koan must have at least twice as many red as blue, and at least as many blue as green.

Game 5

Available symbols: 💀👨‍🦱🐻🦍🤖

Master: Kevan

Winner: Bais

Guesses:

Rule: A koan has the budda nature unless it contains "X 🤖 X", where X is any non-🤖 symbol.

Game 6

Available symbols: ♣️♠️♥️♦️

Master: Bais

Winner: None, game abandoned

Guesses:

Rule: A koan has the Buddha nature if, after changing one symbol, it is a palindrome.

Game 7

Available symbols: 🌲, 🍄, 🌻

Master: NotAJumbleOfNumbers

Winner: None, game abandoned

Rule: EXACTLY two of the three must be true:

• The string must be at least 5 emoji long
• There must be a 🍄🍄 somewhere
• The amount of 🌲s must be even

Game 8

Available symbols: 👨‍🌾 🐺 🐑 🥬

Master: Zaratustra

Winner: Kevan

Rule: a koan does not have the Buddha nature if it lacks a 👨‍🌾, yet also contains a 🐺 and a 🐑, and/or a 🐑 and a 🥬.

Game 9

Available symbols: 🍀 ❤️ ☀️

Master: TyGuy6

Winner: None, game abandoned

Rule: It's ⚪ iff there is exactly one ☀️, with the same number of 🍀 on one side as there are ❤️ on the other side. So 🍀☀️ works, for the same reason just ☀️ works, because the clovers on the right are 0, which matches the hearts on the left.

Game 10

Available symbols: ♠️♣️♥️♦️

Master: Raven1207

Winner: Game abandoned after the Master mistakenly believed that a wrong guess was valid and revealed their rule

Posited guess: A koan has the buddha-nature if it consists in its entirety of a specific pair of symbols repeated one or more times, one pair after the other without being flipped.

Rule: My rule was that ♠️♣️♦️♥️ where treated as 1, 2, 3, and 4 and the sequence was a number they made together and it ⚪ if the number was a multiple of the number that ends made (eg. 1234 is not a multiple of 14, so would be black)

Game 11

Available symbols: 👹 🦍 🤡 👾

Master: Josh

Winner: None, game abandoned

Rule: If the four symbols are taken to mean "rotate 90 degrees left and move forward", "rotate 90 degrees right and move forward", "move forward" and "rotate 180 degrees and move backward", a koan has the Buddha nature if it translates into a string of instructions which return an imaginary object to its starting position.

Game 12

Available symbols: 🏗️ 🏤 🏥 🏬 🏢

Master: Kevan

Winner: Zaratustra

Rule: Must have a 🏗️ exactly two spaces away from a 🏢.

Game 13

Available Symbols: 🤠 ◀️ ▶️ 🔼 🔽

Master: Josh

Winner: Clucky

Rule: An odd number of ordinal directions pointing at any cowboy

Game 14

Available Symbols: 🐻 🍯 🌲 🌳

Master: Clucky

Winner: Cuddlebeam

Rule: "Each bear gotta have their own honey, and they got to be able to get on top of their honey in 2 “jumps” (North, West, South, East, no diagonals) or less."

Game 15

Available Symbols: 🙊🙉🙈😈

Master: Cuddlebeam

Winner: Chiiika

Rule: A koan must have ghost and monkey emoji

Game 16

Available Symbols: 🔼◀️🔽▶️🤷🏻‍♀️

Master: Chiiika

winner: Game Abandoned

Rule: A koan has the Buddha Nature if all of the three is true: 1) The girl symbol is in the middle of the koan; 2) there are at least one left and right sym; 3) there are only two down symbol

Game 17

Available Symbols: E N D

Master: Jumble

Winner: Tyguy

Rule: A koan is white if it starts with a different letter than it ends with.

Game 18

Available Symbols: ❤️ 💛 🧡 💚 💜 💙

Master: Trapdoorspyder

Winner: Clucky

Ruke: There is a red, blue and yellow. And then every purple is between a red and a blue, every green is between a blue and a yellow, and every orange is between a yellow and a red. (between doesn't have to be immediately between, 💙💛💜🧡❤️ would be buddah because the purple is still inbetween the blue and red at the ends, and the orange is inbetween the yellow and red)

Meta-Zendo 1

Available Rules: A koan is a rule for games of zendo using the symbols 🐙🐳🦭, or perhaps more formally, functions (that I can understand) mapping strings of these symbols, up to length 20, to yes-or-no-buddha nature.

Master: pokes

Winner: Snail

Guesses:

⚪️:

1. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] The number of 🐙 is the same as the number of 🐳.
2. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] it has three or fewer symbols.
3. A koan has the Buddha-nature iff it is the empty koan.

⚫️:

1. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] The substring "🦭🐳" is present.

Meta-rule: A rule has the buddha nature if under that rule, the empty koan has the buddha nature.

Meta-Zendo 2

Available Rules: A koan is a rule for games of zendo using the symbols: 🦑🐳🦭, or perhaps more formally, functions (that I can understand) mapping strings of these symbols, up to length 20, to yes-or-no-buddha nature.

Master: Bucky

Winner: Clucky

⚪ :

1. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] The substring "🦭🐳" is present.
2. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it contains a 🦭
3. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it exists.
4. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it is length 5 or greater.
5. A koan does not have the buddha nature.
6. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it has length 4 or greater
7. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it has length 19 or greater
8. [a koan has the buddha nature if] it is length 2 or greater
9. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it is length 20 or greater.
10. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it ends with a 🐳

⚫ :

1. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] The number of 🦑 is the same as the number of 🐳 .
2. [A koan has the Buddha-nature iff] it contains the three symbols exactly twice each.
3. 🦑 cannot be adjacent to 🐳.
4. [A koan has the Buddha-Nature iff] it contains a non-0 Prime Number amount of symbols.
5. [a koan has the buddha nature iff] it contains no 🦑 and no 🐳 symbols
6. [ A koan has the buddha nature iff] it is length 4
7. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] there is no 🦭 adjacent to a 🐳
8. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it is a palindrome
9. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it is either length 2 or length 5
10. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it spells out a valid English Word (as defined by Oxford Dictionary) in binary (see below for encoding details) with 🦑 as 1, 🐳 as 0 and ignoring 🦭
11. [A koan has the buddha nature iff] it spells out a valid English Word containing the letter E in binary with 🦑 as 1, 🐳 as 0 and ignoring 🦭 (same assumptions)
12. A koan has the buddha nature iff it is length 5 or less

Meta-rule: Whenever a koan ending in a 🐳 is not-buddha, so is that koan without the final 🐳.

Meta-Zendo 3

Available Rules: A koan is a rule for games of zendo using the symbols: 🦁 🐯 🐻 , or perhaps more formally, functions (that I can understand) mapping strings of these symbols, up to length 20, to yes-or-no-buddha nature. Master: Clucky Winner: Bucky

Meta-rule: "A rule has the meta-buddha nature if it there are more buddha koans that contain a 🐻 than those which contain a 🦁"