neither colour has any eyes
Okay, here’s a counterexample 
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Do you have a red counterexample?
It seems that white and black stones are not touching
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Oh, I thought you were just making a conjecture about one property of the green koans, not a guess of the entire rule. So this does it, right?
And if it weren’t possible I would have had to just reveal that fact, right?
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Yes, I think it’s more fun (personally) to find a rule that fits all prompts. It’s sometimes a challenge to the Master, and becomes more and more challenging for the students, unless they want to formulate very ‘ugly’ conjectures
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I also enjoy this style of play where we’re free to just make up guesses and be handed counterexamples. It is quite different gameplay wise though (putting less emphasis on the exploratory aspect where we need to come up with good koans ourselves), so I think it should be up to each Master to decide how their game is played.
I like the fact that coming up with consistent rules can potentially become harder and harder, which means that submitting koans as usual can still be useful. That is something this variant (allowing free rule guesses) has going for it compared to allowing any kind of conjectures such as “The rule is invariant to color inversion”, which is perhaps too powerful.
What do you think @Feijoa?
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In the original Zendo the master only has to reveal one counterexample to a rule guess, but it might be fun to accidentally learn that your guess is strictly larger or smaller than the actual rule, so I’m happy to keep going this way.
I think one argument against using that too much might be that the flow of the game becomes more determined by the master. It seems like I have to be pretty careful not to give away too much in all these examples.
From the original, we’re also missing the “Mondo” round dynamic. Maybe we could occasionally take a poll before the answer, to encourage more engagement?
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So far red Koans have lots of stones, green have less. I have a suspicion that the rule might be about the empty intersections, maybe something like “The empty intersections form one connected area.” I’d like to test this with the following Koan:
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The empty intersections outnumber the nonempty intersections.
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I guess the other extreme would be that we have only one guess at the rule, and will lose if it is incorrect. Such a single guess needs to be agreed upon by all students.
Such a game sounds like fun as well.
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The lone white stone in koan 150 has one eye, then? 
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Yes, the master only has to give one counterexample, but if you’re feeling generous you can give more than one!
Here is my guess:
There is a 2x2 square of empty intersections.
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Yes.
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Two for the price of one 
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Since this observation still holds…
… I will make the rule guess:
There are no black stones adjacent to white stones.
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Trying this on mobile, hope I didn’t mess it up:
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How about somebody makes a poll with three random or interesting positions so everyone watching can test their intuition? Eight hours or so should be enough. Whoever does best can guess the rule next
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Koans 154 and 158 are both red counterexamples now
Koan 162?
- Green
- Red
0 voters
Koan 163?
- Green
- Red
0 voters
Koan 164?
- Green
- Red
0 voters
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