So there’s six months left until the closing date for the Army Of Zero prize competition -  30th April 2010.  Plenty of time yet to solve the riddle and send it into us for a chance to win £1000.

So far - as far as we know - no-one’s cracked the whole thing, but we are in touch with a number of enthusiasts, some via email, some on the web, and it’s very rewarding to see how you’re getting on.

The components that are proving to be the most awkward to people seem to be the three lower shields.  In addition, I haven’t heard from anyone who’s figured out the overall objective.  The various sub-puzzles are coming together quite nicely, but figuring out where it all leads to seems to be evading people so far.  If you can deduce that, it might just let you approach the remaining items from a different angle.

Do please remember when you submit your entry to include the competition entry card, which you’ll find in the box.

So you might have noticed via a Twitter announcement earlier in the week, or via the link on this site’s home page, that we posted some alternative rule variants for Army Of Zero this week.  You can read them here.

These are rule variants for the basic game.  We’re still (yes, still!) working on a co-operative Army Of Zero game, using the existing cards but pitting players against a common foe, but it’s been hard to get the thing working as well as we wanted, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that.  But have a look at the new, optional rules for the existing game, and see if you like them.

You can pick and choose which ones you want to incorporate into your games, but I confess that my favourite is the one we’ve called the “Champion” variant.  In this version, you don’t have to pre-order your characters and play through them in that order - you can choose any character from your hand to go into battle. We’ve found that if you play the game this way, it’s much more natural to develop favourite characters, and as a player you become rather more involved in your characters’ struggles.  You feel it more when they lose, but you also enjoy it more when they are victorious.  We like this variant so much that we used it almost exclusively at Game ‘09 in Manchester last weekend.

At Game ‘09, we also used the “Skirmish” variant, where each player receives five cards instead of the more usual ten.  We opted for this to make the games shorter, so we could get through more rounds with the show visitors who wanted a game, and it worked pretty well.  We didn’t use the “Carnage” variant, which replaces the game’s six-sided dice with eight-sided ones, because the standard game only comes with the six-sided dice.  We just wanted to present the game using whatever was in the box.

This coming Saturday and Sunday (17th and 18th October) you can come and meet us at Game ‘09 in Manchester!

Along with a whole host of board games, card games, RPGs and computer games, Point Zero Games will be there playing lots of Army Of Zero, and we’ll have copies of our Manchester treasure hunts on sale too.

Also, come and have a look at the great word game LeCardo, which we’re proud to be demonstrating as well.

You can get tickets on the door, or book them online at the Game ‘09 web site. Tickets cost £10 per adults (over 15s), £7 for over 10s and under 10s are free. Each entry ticket includes a £3 voucher to use at the show.

More about very difficult puzzles, following on from last week’s post…

As far as jigsaw puzzles are concerned, you might remember that about his time last year, jigsaw manufacturer Ravensburger was getting a lot of publicity for its Jungle Scenes puzzle, which had just been completed by a British man in about 3 months.  It had 18,200 pieces, and apparently it is known as “The Everest” amongst jigsaw fans.

But hey! there’s a larger one called “Life”, which has the Guinness Book Of Records entry for the world’s largest commercial jigsaw puzzle, with a massive 24,000 pieces.

Of course it’s not all about the number of pieces.  Some experts say that the hardest jigsaw ever is a version of Jackson Pollock’s painting “Convergence“, by Springbok, which dates back to the 1960’s.  Only 340 pieces, but the image makes it a challenge that few people have the patience to successfully complete.

And you can also get jigsaws where the picture is a single solid colour.  Here’s an online version that you can try, but to me, these don’t really count because they’re just wilfully difficult, and being able to build up a picture is a fundamental part of a jigsaw.

If you’re finding yourself getting stuck on the Army Of Zero puzzles, here’s a bit of light relief, in the guise of a series of blog posts about the hardest, most fiendish puzzles in the world! After these, you’re going to be glad to come back to Army Of Zero…

This week I’m going to point you towards the hardest logic puzzle ever, according to philosopher George Boolos. I’ll add more posts at future dates about other kinds of puzzles.

OK, here we go, hold on tight to something.  This is what is reputed to be the hardest logic puzzle:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.

So it’s similar to what’s known as the knight/knave puzzle, in which you’re asked to imagine yourself on an island where some of the population always lie and the rest always tell the truth, you don’t know which is which, and you have to find a reliable way of getting the truth out of someone.  Only in this version, it’s way, way harder because (a) you might be talking to someone who lies or tells the truth at random, and (b) you don’t know whether their answer means “yes” or “no”.

My brain is melting out of my ears.  If you want to read more - and see the solution - go and have a look on Wikipedia.