…It seems to me that the Rule Deck should have negative versions of every Rule.

A: This has been a trend from the beginning of Zendo, and one might view it as a deficit in the way the game is played, accidentally limiting the way people think about things, since they’re mostly concentrating on positives. People are simply attuned more to the presence of things rather than the absence of things. Whether this is because of the way the game was conceived, and people have become used to it, or whether it was conceived that way because of human nature, is immaterial.

Whatever the cause, this means that “negative rules” or “rules of absence” or “zero rules” are known to be more difficult, even though all it really means is that the color of the marking stones is reversed from what you would do for a positively stated rule. Every rule, is, in essence, simply a binary division of Structures into one category vs. its opposite.

This does mean that the solution is very simple. If you, as a Moderator (aka Master), want to play a “negative” version of any rule, you simply reverse the color of the way you mark your Structures. If the rule is stated positively, and you want to play it as the negative version, you simply mark the Structures which follow the card rule with black instead of white. Do keep in mind, however, that unless your player group is attuned to the possibility of negative rules, it will likely increase the estimated difficulty. This is not advised for beginner groups.

The Zendo Rule deck does contain some zero rules and rules of absence, but certainly not one for every single positively-stated card. That simply wouldn’t be practical for us, as it would be prohibitively expensive for us to print essentially an entire second deck, when the solution is achieved fairly simply.