There’s exactly one year to go until the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition!  It sounds like a long time, doesn’t it?  But if the last 12 months are anything to go by, the time will rocket by and before long we’ll be selecting our winner and awarding the £1,000 prize.

We’ve been having a few people ask recently about the method that we’re going to use to pick a winner, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a blog post on the subject.  It’s potentially tricky to write this post, because although we have a set of criteria for making sure that we pick a winner fairly, stating those criteria would give the answers away.  So instead, I’m going for some general pointers.

First of all, apart from the closing date (30th April 2010), time isn’t a factor.  The first correct solution is not necessarily going to be the winner, and there’s no advantage to getting your solution in early.  A good solution sent to us this month (April 2009) will lose out to a very good solution sent to us in April 2010.

We’re looking for a single answer.  The answer is more than one word, but not enough to fill a postcard.

That said, the “better” solutions are going to indicate how the answer was reached.  It’s possible to get close to the final answer without solving all the puzzles.  If you guess, it’s even possible to get exactly the right answer without solving all the puzzles.  So we’ll be giving credit to contestants who explain where their answer came from.  We’ve got a checklist of all the puzzles, and we’ll be checking each entry against that list.

How many items are on the checklist?  Well, I’m not going to say exactly, partly because I don’t want to give anything away, and partly because a straight answer might actually be a bit confusing.  The number of puzzles in Army Of Zero depends on how you count them: they intersect a bit, you see.  If pushed, I normally tell people that there are “12 or 13″ puzzles to solve, but it’s possible to count them differently.  But you will get credit for any of the items on our checklist as long as they’re included in your competition entry, no matter how you classify or group them.

Puzzle site tweleve.org has a thread going about Army Of Zero, where I’ve posted a couple of messages about solving the riddle.

Toy News Magazine is running a feature article about games and puzzles (on the rise in these difficult times, because staying in is the new going out, apparently) in which Point Zero Games gets a section.  Read it here.

The latest (US) edition of Wired Magazine is a “mystery issue“, with lots of stuff about brain teasers, codes, mazes and loads of the stuff that puzzle fanatics love.  Here’s an excerpt which is in the print edition, but isn’t on the Wired website (at least, I couldn’t find it).

Feeling stuck?  Dvora K. Klaviatura, head of the Belarus Enigmatology Institute (www.typein.by.pyacbm.by), offers these tips. 1. LOOK FOR PATTERNS. Puzzles are logical systems.  They follow rules.  Once you know the governing principles, watch for telling patterns or anomalies.  2. FIND THE WAY IN. Though it may seem counterintuitive, puzzlesare designed to be solved, not to stump you.  Look for the entry point, like the first number you can nail down [in a Sudoku].  3. BUILD ON YOUR SUCCESS. Puzzle solving is progressive.  Take advantage of the information you provide yourself.  For example, identifying and decoding one [clue] will make finding the rest - and solving the overall mystery - a bit easier.

I’m quoting this here because it’s perfect advice for you if you ‘re looking for a way into the Army Of Zero puzzles.  Oh, and for your entertainment: it looks like a puzzle in itself.  (Dvora K. Klaviatura?  Um, OK…)

You can divide games players into three types:

1. Those who play by the official rules.
2. Those who think they are playing by the official rules, but who have got something (usually slightly) wrong.
3. Those who play by their own modified versions of the official rules.

Actually, there’s also a Type 4 who don’t play by any agreed or consistent set of rules, but since these are known as “dirty rotten cheaters”, we won’t discuss them any further.

The game that I can think of where the three main types are most prevalent is actually one of the most successful board games ever - Monopoly.  I haven’t done the research, but I’m willing to guess that more people fall into types 2 and 3 with Monopoly than with any other popular game.

I’m not a fan of Monopoly (though we have two copies in the house, in addition to copies of Junior Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly), and I think a lot of people share those feelings, but it’s a great example of rule variants.  Some of the unofficial rule variants that exist are so well-known that they have become de facto rules that need agreeing, and the pre-game checklist  becomes:

• Choose a banker
• Pick your tokens
• Roll to see who starts
• Are we paying fines to the Free Parking square?

The preponderance of rule variants doesn’t reflect well on Monopoly.  Players usually introduce the variants to either make the game more interesting (like the Free Parking rule mentioned above), or to correct some real or perceived flaw in the gameplay.  For example, the start of Monopoly, according to the standard rules, is notoriously unfair in favour of the person who starts and to the detriment of those who set off last.  In a six-player game, the poor sixth player finds themselves following in the dust of the other players, landing on property that’s already been snapped up and not only having to cough up rent from the get-go but not having the opportunity to buy property themselves.

One of the variants most often introduced to tackle this is the rule that you can’t buy anything on the first time around the board.  I was never convinced by this rule, because at best all you’re doing is shifting the problem from the start of the game to the point where someone completes the first lap.  In fact I suspect it makes it worse, because by the end of that first lap everyone’s more spread out.  In fact it’s not inconceivable that the pace-setters could lap the tail-enders through pure chance, leaving the tail-enders with even slimmer pickings once they finally complete their first lap.

An alternative is to randomly stagger the start, so instead of everyone starting on Go, some players start from Go, some start from Just Visiting, some start from Free Parking and some start from Go To Jail.  I haven’t tried this myself, but it sounds like it makes sense (though if you don’t want some players to feel hard-done-by, it helps if they appreciate that Mayfair and Park Lane aren’t the best set of properties).

And so on and so forth.  Click this link for more suggested rule variants for Monopoly.

Another interesting phenomenon, particularly noticeable amongst the better known games - and again, Monopoly is a prime example - is the way that everyone thinks they know the rules, but actually they don’t exactly.  For example, I just found out - and I’m sure I’ve never played Monopoly this way - that if a player lands on an unowned property and decides not to buy it, then the property is auctioned to the highest bidder.  Wow, really?  Have a look at this PDF from Hasbro’s own site if you don’t believe me.

The reason for having this post in the first place is that we’ve been thinking about “official” rule variants for Army Of Zero.

There are a couple of rule variants that we’re playtesting at the moment and are broadly happy with, and a further couple that need a bit more work before we’re really happy with them.  The latter two are about playing Army Of Zero with more than two players: we’ll get back to you on those.

The other two are very straightforward, and we know of a few players already using them.  Firstly, you don’t need ten cards each at the start of the game.  If you want to play a quicker game, why not try five cards each?  Or if you want a longer game, try playing with 15 cards each.

Secondly, here’s a variant that can be used if you don’t like players having different sizes of Squad (after some warriors have been defeated).  Basically, when a combat is over, the losing player discards their warrior, and the winning player, instead of putting the winning card onto a separate pile ready for the next phase, just puts it to the bottom of their Squad Pile.  Play simply continues until one player has no cards left.  This variant was explained to me as a way to cut down on the space you need to play the game (you can basically play it on you knees, although some sort of container to throw the dice into is recommended!) but it also eliminates the way that some warriors don’t “get a turn” when the two squad sizes are different, because each card still comes up in rotation.

We’ll be “officially” making available a set of rules variants shortly.  In the meantime, feel free to contact us, either via email or in the comments below, if you have any favourite variants of your own.

We got a nice write up in the Wilmslow Express (our local newspaper) last week, after they followed up on a press release that we put out after the Toy Fair.  We did a phone interview and sent them one of our standard publicity photos.

The Wilmslow Express put a lot of their articles online, but unfortunately not this one, so we scanned it in so we could post it up here.

Click on the image to see a larger version.