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The origin of the game
Mastermind, the hunt for the hidden order
The ancestor of this game is as old as pencil and paper. A century ago English schoolchildren played it as 'Bulls and Cows': one person held a secret number in mind, the other guessed, and after each guess learned how many digits were both right and in the right place (a bull) and how many were right but misplaced (a cow). The winner cracked the hidden order in the fewest guesses. No board, no pieces were needed, only a secret arrangement and a mind trying to read it.
In 1970 a postmaster named Mordecai Meirowitz moved the game onto a board of colored pegs and called it Mastermind. The big toy companies turned the idea down; a small British firm took it on, and within a decade it had sold fifty million boxes. The stern-faced man on the box became an icon for a generation. Yet the secret was always the same: deduction. Each piece of feedback narrows the possibilities, and the right order gives itself away step by step.
At House of Zij the hidden order is built not from digits but from the seven classical planets. The sky holds a sequence, and you try to read it; each reading tells you whether a planet has found its house. This is, in truth, the astrologer's oldest work: drawing a hidden order out of scattered signs. The sky never tells you the answer outright. It gives you only marks, and an eye that knows how to read completes the rest.
The sky never tells you the answer outright; it gives you only marks, and an eye that knows how to read completes the rest.