Zendo, which I’ve heard called “science: the game”. One person acts as the game master, coming up with a secret rule that matches certain arrangements of the game pieces. (Typically stackable pyramids, but lego works, and I’ve played through discord using emoji.) E.g. “no pyramid is pointing at another pyramid” or “there are more red pyramids than pyramids on their side”. Other players work to figure it out—in theory that’s competitive, but IME it’s pretty common for them to end up cooperating when the rule is tricky.
As a player I enjoy getting to look at a bunch of evidence, form hypotheses, run experiments and generally try to figure out wtf is going on. As the game master I enjoy seeing what completely unexpected directions my players thoughts run in, coming up with rules of a good difficulty level (illusion of transparency!), and using counterexamples to either give them useful hints or not according to mood.
Zendo, which I’ve heard called “science: the game”. One person acts as the game master, coming up with a secret rule that matches certain arrangements of the game pieces. (Typically stackable pyramids, but lego works, and I’ve played through discord using emoji.) E.g. “no pyramid is pointing at another pyramid” or “there are more red pyramids than pyramids on their side”. Other players work to figure it out—in theory that’s competitive, but IME it’s pretty common for them to end up cooperating when the rule is tricky.
As a player I enjoy getting to look at a bunch of evidence, form hypotheses, run experiments and generally try to figure out wtf is going on. As the game master I enjoy seeing what completely unexpected directions my players thoughts run in, coming up with rules of a good difficulty level (illusion of transparency!), and using counterexamples to either give them useful hints or not according to mood.