Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] [Zendo] Another Spock Rule question

  • FromJake Eakle <jseakle@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateThu, 4 Aug 2011 20:40:39 -0400
Do you really think the Scrabble-word rule is unilaterally too hard? Because this is exactly what I'm talking about. There are people (myself maybe included, if I knew ahead of time that this was Intense Zendo) who could guess that rule, and have fun doing it. It is patently ridiculous to legislate it out of existence. It is a bad rule for the majority of Zendo players, yes, but as previously discussed the Prime rule is also a bad rule for many, many Zendo players, and yet a perfectly normal, even easy, one for many others. Who are you to impose your beliefs about what is 'too hard' on everyone else?

Spock recreates the game on the Enterprise, and can no longer see your shirt.  Neither did he take note of the colour, since it wasn't part of the pieces or their orientation to the game surface.  Ergo, I think this fails the Spock rule.

There is actually a bit of a subtlety here, so I won't just flat out say you're wrong. The rule 'AKHTBN iff it shares a color with my shirt at the time it is marked' is in fact illegal. If you are planning to spill ketchup on your yellow shirt halfway through and start marking koans with red in them differently, that's a big no-no. But making an otherwise kinda random rule (like AKHTBN iff it contains a red or yellow piece) more meaningful for the players by choosing it such that it lines up with some salient aspect of the present situation is no problem. You just have to make sure you resolve and 'lock in' all outside references prior to starting the game.

To go back to the Scrabble Dictionary rule, if a new edition was published during the game, the master would be obliged not to update his markings accordingly. But if the master memorizes the dictionary and codifies the assignment from colors to letters ahead of time, its perfectly fine.



--
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.