Failing Logic

For a while now, I've been meaning to write about a game my group tried out. It has slipped my mind because the group as a whole didn't seem to care for it, and it's now been many months since we played it. But it appealed to me in a way that seemed worth at least a brief nod on the blog.

It's a logic puzzle game called Zendo. It's an older game, as it happens, recently made available again through a new edition. It comes with a variety of plastic pieces all a bit more than an inch in size. There are three shapes: wedges, pyramids, and blocks (rectangular). There are also three colors, with every shape available in every color: red, yellow, and blue. These pieces are used to build small structures -- combinations of different numbers and colors of different things, touching or not, stacked or not, pointing to each other or not... a variety of patterns.

Patterns are what the game is all about. Each player takes a turn as a moderator, drawing a card that secretly assigns them a rule that all structures must follow to be valid. The moderator then starts things off with two sample structures, one that follows the rule and one that does not. From there, it's up to the remaining players to apply logic and suss out the rule.

On a player's turn, they build a structure, articulating what they believe the rule to be and illustrating it through their example. If they're incorrect, then the moderator must build a counter-example, one that obeys the true rule while at the same time proving as false what the guesser just attempted to demonstrate. Play proceeds until one player correctly guesses the rule and scores a point. You then pass around the moderator role until everyone has had an equal number of chances, and the highest score wins.

I haven't spent a lot of time around campfires in my life, but this feels very much like a "campfire game." You know, those sort of logic puzzles about whether you're allowed to pick up this or that thing on a grocery trip, whether it's valid to draw a line from here to here versus here to there, and so forth. These games can come up at big group dinners too, after you order but before the food arrives. I've always loved those things.

My group, it seems, did not. Well, not this one, anyway. We honestly didn't play many rounds of Zendo before there was a collective begging to switch to some other game. I was left wanting more.

Zendo has some nice constraints on it that keep the puzzles from getting too ridiculous. Rules are divided into Easy, Medium, and Hard. They can form around just a single characteristic, or be a compound of two characteristics. They allow a bit of flexibility, where the moderator chooses a particular shape, number, or color to incorporate, marking it on the card with a plastic clip to keep things honest. (Cleverly, the cards sometimes also have fake places to clip, just so the guessers won't know if they're after one trait or two.)

I will say in my group's defense there is something quite fundamentally different about a guessing game in which just one person has the answer, something that can make everyone else feel like a dope if things unravel. It seems like most of the games using this sort of approach are social and fast-paced -- I have the answer because it's my personal answer to a question, and it will only take us a minute or so before everyone knows. (See: That's a Question.) More common still are games that make everyone a guesser (Telestrations) or make them divide into teams in a way that at least creates two clue givers (Codenames). By all that, I mean that I get why this might not be everyone's cup of tea.

It doesn't feel right to me to suggest a grade for Zendo. It's suspect enough when I grade a game after a single play as I sometimes do. I don't even think we got through one full game of Zendo by the rules before my group pulled the plug on it. But like I said, it appealed to me. And if logic puzzles are your thing, I suspect it will appeal to you. I'd give it a look.