I would cautiously note that some Zendo Variant, played with other equipment including light-bulbs in the Koan construction, would allow shadows to be taken into consideration. I have played Zendo with beer bottles, wooden meeples, and other stuff, and the principle is the same. So, if your specific game uses light bulbs, then you could probably use shadows. I can imagine a D.I.Y. project of embedding small LEDs inside of a pyramid to effectively create a kind of small light bulb. This allows at least 2 new properties of the pyramid to play with: Light on or Light off, and in relationship to the shadow of another pyramid. And, do so knowing that you are treading your own path of invention. But no, standard Zendo does not take shadows into account. We must be able to build all Koans in another nation, a hundred years fFrom now, and maintain all properties. On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Brian McCue <brianmccue22312@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The Zendo rules forbid external references, other than to the surface on which the pieces rest: BNs can't refer to, e.g., "a flat pyramid pointing North," or "the pyramid nearest the Master," or even "the pyramid nearest the edge of the table." > > Last night, a player wanted to know if the BN could be something like "the shadow of a large pyramid falls upon a small pyramid." I said no, on the grounds that it was a forbidden external reference, but then somebody asked what was external about it, and I had a hard time saying. > > Was I right anyway? > > Brian > _______________________________________________ > Icehouse mailing list > Icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.looneylabs.com/mailman/listinfo/icehouse > -- A pizza with the radius 'z' and thickness 'a' has the volume pi*z*z*a.