** Check out the video tutorial below **
Professor Xendo, a very famous physicist, was on the cusp of a breakthrough about Quantum Clusters when he suffered an unfortunate accident and passed away (fortunately he was smart and signed up for cryonics so his brain is preserved to be brought back in the future).
But all is not lost! Just before he died, he built a very powerful Xendo Machine. This machine can analyse the Clusters and tell whether they have a positive charge or a negative one. Except no one knows why some Clusters are positive and others are negative!
That's where you come in. You're a scientist, tasked with finishing Professor Xendo's work. You can conduct experiments, publish peer reviewed papers, and get funding for more research. If you figure out the true law, you will win the Noble Prize of Science for sure!
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Some Clusters have positive charge, some are negative. Can you figure out which, and why? In this tabletop abstract induction game, you and up to four other friends will gather and try to discover one of Nature's laws and win the Noble Prize of Science.
How to play:
1. The player who starts the game is the Xendo Machine, and the others are the Scientists.
2. The Machine creates a law for Clusters to follow (a Cluster is nothing more than a group of cubes,
spheres, and pyramids of various sizes on a tray).
3. The Machine then produces two Clusters:
• One that obeys the rule and has positive charge.
• One that doesn't and has negative charge.
Then the game proceeds in turns for the Scientists.
4. At the start of each turn, the Scientist must build a new Cluster.
5. Then the Scientist either does an "Experiment" or asks for "Peer Review."
• If the Scientist chose to do an experiment, the Machine will measure the charge of the Cluster.
• If the Scientist asked for a peer review, each Scientist (including themself) has to try to guess
whether that Cluster is positive or negative. Then the Machine measures the charge, and all the
Scientists who guessed it correctly will get Funds for their research.
6. Then, if the Scientist has funds, they may spend it to write a paper about the law. Three things
may happen in this case:
• The paper is correct, the game ends and the Scientist wins!
• The paper is contradicted by a Cluster that's already been measured, in which case a
colleague points that out and the Scientist retains their funds.
• The paper is incorrect, in which case the Machine builds a new Cluster to serve as a
counterexample to it (representing the Scientific Community's reaction to the paper). This can
be either a Cluster that obeys the real rule and not the Scientist's, or one that obeys the
Scientist's and not the real rule.
7. If the Scientist still has funding, they may spend as much as they like writing more papers.
For more information, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_%28game%29 and http://www.koryheath.com/zendo/ (with the flavour here: http://www.looneylabs.com/sites/default/files/literature/XendoOverview.pdf). A video tutorial on how to play the game on Second Life is provided below.
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Included:
• A Xendo machine to play.
• An instructions notecard.
The owner of the game must have rez rights. The game will rez HUDs that will serve as temporary attachments for the players, and each turn new wooden trays and objects will be rezzed, so the LI of a game in progress can get quite high (though the Machine has the ability to derez Clusters if the game starts becoming too heavy).
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This and Zendo are the exact same game with the exact same rules. The only difference is the flavour and the meshes.
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