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Zen Flower Showdown

You are arranging flowers because your master says it will lead to enlightenment, but all of the other students want enlightenment too. You need to arrange flowers quickly and with greater harmony, so that you can be first to become enlightened!

19mar2009: Over at BoardGameGeek, someone laid down the challenge of designing a game that consists of just four cards or tiles. Thinking about my previous work with cardstock dice, I decided that three of the cards could assemble to form a trio of dice. The fourth card is a target.

Because I could give the dice any values I wanted, I made them nontransitive. This means that the first one rolls higher than the second one more than half the time, the second one rolls higher than the third more than half the time, and the third rolls higher than the first more than half the time.

The game is nominally about furious but harmonious flower arranging, with the dice as flowers and the target as the vase.

Zen Flower Showdown is available here as a PDF.

Update: Although the game did not win the contest, it was entered into the game database: ZFS at BGG