User:El Sandifer/DK

A Duck Konundrum is a puzzlehunt activity that is most commonly seen at the MIT Mystery Hunt. Created by MIT student Dan Katz in 2000 (and bearing his initials), a Duck Konundrum involves a group of players, a set of instructions, and a live duck. The instructions are convoluted, and so players must carefully follow them in sequence so that a final solution is obtained. The duck is one of the participants, and it frequently must quack when certain events are completed--hence, the duck role is usually undertaken by a player, since ducks can't read convoluted instructions.

A Duck Konundrum appeared in the 2003 Maze of Games. This Konundrum had the following introductory instructions:

''The Intermediate Five-Man Skyzzrd variant of Escape From Zyzzlvaria is exquisitely simple. As in the regular game, Player One uses Harold (the green piece), Player Two uses Ralph (orange), Player Three uses Leah (blue), Player Four uses Zoe (pink), and Player Five uses the beloved Captain Blastoid (the metallic piece). In this variant you are given five instructions each round. Each player "moves" by following one of these instructions, in the order that the instructions are given. However, the order in which the players "move" changes each round. The player order proceeds as follows: '' ''In addition, the order is reversed if there are an odd number of players in the Reversion Dimension. This player order is determined at the beginning of each round before any moves are made, and it does not change until the next round.''
 * Any player who is on fire
 * Any player with blue skin
 * Any players who are dancing (in alphabetical order by dance name)
 * Any players in a lettered sector (in alphabetical order by sector letter)
 * Everyone else (in increasing order by player number)

Those were just the beginnings of the instructions.

A poker game of the same name appeared in the book Dealer's Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker. In it, each player writes down a rule that the game will observe like "Aces are wild" or "low hand wins", and these rules are put into a hat. The duck draws a rule from the hat on each deal and reads it aloud, and that rule remains in place for the rest of the game. Contradictions are resolved by the easiest method possible, so if on successive turns the duck reads "fours are wild" and "fours are low," fours are wild AND low.