Zendo house rules

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Revision as of 17:54, 18 October 2020 by Kevan (talk | contribs) (swap to emoji icons, change headings)
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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 black or white circle "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 may not Mondo during the first round.
  • 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 the possible intention when making the Koan.

History

Game 1

Available symbols: πŸš—πŸοΈ

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: πŸ’£πŸŒˆπŸ°

Master: Josh

Winner: Pokes

Guesses:

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

Game 3

Available symbols: β—€οΈβ–ΆοΈπŸ”Ό

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: πŸŸ₯πŸ”΅πŸŸ©

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: πŸ’€πŸ‘¨β€πŸ¦±πŸ»πŸ¦πŸ€–

Master: Kevan

Winner: Bais

Guesses:

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

Game 6

Available symbols: ♣️♠️β™₯️♦️

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: 🌲, πŸ„, 🌻

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 πŸ„πŸ„ somewhere
  • The amount of 🌲s must be even

Game 8

Available symbols: πŸ‘¨β€πŸŒΎ 🐺 πŸ‘ πŸ₯¬

Master: Zaratustra

Winner: Kevan

Rule: a koan does not have the Buddha nature if it lacks a πŸ‘¨β€πŸŒΎ, yet also contains a 🐺 and a πŸ‘, and/or a πŸ‘ and a πŸ₯¬.

Game 9

Available symbols: πŸ€ ❀️ β˜€οΈ

Master: TyGuy6

Winner: None, game abandoned

Rule: It's βšͺ iff there is exactly one β˜€οΈ, with the same number of πŸ€ on one side as there are ❀️ on the other side. So πŸ€β˜€οΈ works, for the same reason just β˜€οΈ works, because the clovers on the right are 0, which matches the hearts on the left.

Game 10

Available symbols: ♠️♣️β™₯️♦️

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 ♠️♣️♦️β™₯️ where treated as 1, 2, 3, and 4 and the sequence was a number they made together and it βšͺ 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: πŸ‘Ή 🦍 🀑 πŸ‘Ύ

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.