Muzundrum - a portmanteau of "music" and "conundrum" - is a music theory based educational board game developed by the California composer and mystic Jeff S. Kingfisher, who is also the creator of the Muzoracle musical divination and aleatoric composition system.
Muzundrum uses a set of 21 black dice, each with 12 sides, upon which are printed the 12 tones of the western musical scale, from A to G#. These are rolled to create a pool of available notes, which the players then position on a game board, decorated with a honeycomb pattern, to create triad chords and musical scales.
Muzundrum is clearly modeled after the game of Scrabble, just with musical rudiments instead of words. The board has tiles which allow a player to double or treble their score for that round of play, just as in Scrabble, and likewise there are exacting rules about what plays are legal to make. In the base game, only major and natural minor scales are permitted, and only major and minor triad chords, but I prefer an expanded approach, integrating seventh chords of all colours, diminished and augmented triads, and the entire gamut of modes, such as the harmonic minor, double harmonic minor, and so on. I see no reason why the rules system should be restricted to only first semester music theory rudiments, as long as everyone playing the game is at a similar level of knowledge, for the sake of fairness in play.
The dice themselves are handy for compositional prompts and as challenge dice for expanding one's improvisation skills, though any D12 could do as good a job more cheaply. These dice should also only be rolled on a dice tray, because they are heavy enough to damage themselves, each other, and wooden table surfaces, if rolled without a cushioned place to land - or worse, if allowed to fly off the edge of the table and strike a tile kitchen floor - you may infer how little I enjoyed arriving at this knowledge!
Muzundrum is suitable for 1-4 players; it works perfectly fine as a solitary memorisation activity or composition prompt. Over about 4 players, and the game suffers badly from too few game dice to put into play: the game ends when every die is played, so more than 4 players would force a very short game. The difficulty level of the game scales to the experience of the players; it can easily be made more difficult by adjusting the constraints for legal moves, such as by disallowing chords or scales based in a certain mode or key center.
At the end of play, points are tallied based on the length and placement of scales and triads, and the player with the highest score is declared the winner. The Muzundrum website (now mostly defunct apart from a video of gameplay) previously stated that an average game spans 15 to 30 minutes, but in my experience, even 10 minutes is longer than this game takes between experienced musicians, and it will only ever cross the 15 minute threshold when played by young learners. Muzundrum is no longer in active production at the time of this writeup, though used copies can sometimes be found through ebay and other online stores.
Iron Noder 2023, 16/30