In 2017, Looney Labs released a spiffy new edition of Zendo, the classic inductive logic game first published back in 2001. That’s right, Zendo is a game of inductive logic. NOT deductive. What, you don’t know what an inductive logic game is? Don’t worry, neither did I (editor’s note: I still don’t), so allow me to attempt an explanation. Deductive logic games — which I’m sure you are familiar with — are games that present their players with a finite set of possibilities as systemically constrained by their design and tasks them with whittling said possibilities down to one. Some classic examples in this genre include Clue, Sleuth, and Mastermind. Inversely to these, Zendo, being all about that inductive life, presents its players with infinite possibilities and challenges them to find the microscopic needle in the cosmic haystack. Yikes, how could such a concept possibly manifest itself mechanically? The answer to that lies in Zendo‘s amazingly clever and creative design. The goal of Zendo is to uncover a secret rule as decided by a moderator before the game begins. The purpose of this rule is to govern how cute little structures of plastic blocks should be built. These blocks come in three shapes (in the 2017 version, the original had three different sizes of pyramids) and three colors, so a rule might be that a structure must have exactly one block of each color, or that two different shapes must be touching in a certain way, something like that. The designers included a good selection of these…