Looney Pyramids have been around for almost 30 years, and there are now literally hundreds of games you can play with them. Last year we published Pyramid Arcade, featuring 22 of the best pyramid games, along with everything you needed to play each one. However, we didn’t include Zendo, which was surprising to the many pyramid fans who think of Zendo as their favorite pyramid game. BoardGameGeek ranks it as the 18th best abstract game of all time, and Tom Vasel recently proclaimed Zendo as “…the best game Looney Labs has ever made.” So why’d we leave it out? The most obvious reason was the piece set. Pyramid Arcade includes nine pyramids in each of 10 colors, but Zendo is best played with just a few colors and plenty of pieces in each. Zendo also requires an extensive supply of small tokens in three colors, which wouldn’t have been needed by any of the other games, and one of my Pyramid Arcade design goals was for each component to be used in at least two different games, ideally more. But, perhaps the biggest reason was our grand plans for a standalone Zendo set. Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which one player serves as a moderator and chooses a secret rule. They use this rule to build two structures: one which follows the secret rule, and one which does not. Players then take turns building new structures, and the moderator announces for each one whether or not it follows the secret rule. Black and white tokens are placed next to each structure to indicate the moderator’s ruling. Whoever figures out what that rule is wins the game. But where do those secret rules come from? Traditionally, the players just thought them up, but this tends to be the game’s biggest Achilles heel. Although some players greatly enjoy thinking up secret rules, others find it difficult and even intimidating. Moreover, the whole game can fall flat if an overly difficult rule is chosen, and our experience has shown that most players aren’t very good at assessing rule difficulty. People generally underestimate how challenging their rules actually are. For these reasons, I’ve always felt a commercial Zendo set needed to include a deck of rule cards for the moderator to use, rather than depending on player creativity. But that presents its own challenge, since there are so many rule possibilities and a deck would need to include hundreds of cards in order to provide adequate replayability. In 2003, we published a standalone Zendo set featuring pyramids, complete with a set of 16 starter rule cards. This was a compromise solution. The idea was that these cards were a starter set — just enough to get players going. We were hoping that the players would get into creating their own rules after the cards became predictable. But now I think this was a cop-out. A proper Zendo game set needs a robust deck of rule cards. Another design goal I had for a new edition of Zendo was new pieces. Obviously, I love our pyramids — no one loves them more than I do — but I wanted to create something fresh for a new edition of the game. Although it was inspired by the pyramids, Zendo can be played with a range of different options. Fans have played it with Legos and various other tiny tokens and pieces. Even words can be the game pieces for a round of Zendo. Pyramids works well for the game, but what other shapes might serve? In 2014, I actively began trying to create an alternate set of pieces for Zendo. I wanted to include pyramids, but go beyond them, as well, by adding other shapes. I drew sketches of various possibilities, including cubes, domes, and disks, as well as cones and sticks. All of my early ideas failed. Even cubes were proven to be inadequate. They’re simply too symmetrical… the better choice turned out to be blocks, with the same height and footprint as the pyramid. But what other shape could we add? Domes also failed. They look cool, but they just don’t do much, and when placed upside down they are very unstable. Similarly, cones roll around when placed on their sides. Eventually, Alison pointed out that the perfect third shape was a wedge, again with the same height and footprint, since the wedge is kind of a half-way point between the block and the pyramid. And so, at last, we have a new set of pieces which provide the same puzzle-creating options as the original, but with fresh uniqueness that grabs the attention of even the most enthusiastic, old-school Zendo fans. I think they’re even more fun to play Zendo with than regular pyramids. There are so many awesome structures you can create with the new shapes! Speaking of which, we are now using the word “structure” to refer to the little arrangements of pieces you build during the game. Long-time fans of Zendo will probably keep calling them koans, but that’s ok. For those who don’t know, a koan is “a paradoxical anecdote or riddle” used in Zen Buddhism. Other Zen terms were used originally, as well. However, while many players enjoyed this theme, others found it off-putting. We considered adapting it to a different theme, but in the end we concluded that no theme at all is best and now present the game in purely abstract terms. After finalizing the pieces, I started designing the secret rule cards. Since it would be prohibitively expensive to include hundreds of ‘em, I devised a system that would allow one card to generate several different rules. For example, a very simple secret rule would be that a structure must contain a piece of a specific color. The set could include three different cards: “must contain a red piece,” “must contain a blue piece,” and “must contain a yellow piece,” but the better idea is one card with all three colors listed, and instructions for the moderator to choose one at the start of the game. Rule cards could also let the moderator choose between the three shapes: pyramid, block, or wedge. Thus, one card could generate three, nine, even 15 unique rules. I soon created a deck of 40 rule cards that generate well over 200 unique secret rules. One final idea really makes these new rule cards work well: a pair of plastic paper clips which attach to the card, indicating which of the options the moderator has “locked in” for this round. We also did the best we could to gauge the rule card difficulties, marking each one Easy, Moderate, or Difficult. We needed packaging that would be as awesome as the gameplay, so we turned to Eileen Tjan and our friends at OTHER Studios. We loved their work on our company logo, Fluxx 5.0, Nanofictionary, and, of course, Pyramid Arcade, and as usual, OTHER did a great job! So, it’s taken a long time to get here, but the new edition of Zendo is finally ready — and it’s a thing of beauty!
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