Clint Walker
United States
Mattoon
Illinois
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There's no way you can pass by a game of Ingenious being played and NOT want to play it. I'm even going so far as to say that it's hard to even see a freaking PICTURE of the game and not at least be sort of taken in by it, and this can even apply to those who don't normally cotton to "abstract strategy" games...people like myself, since deep down I need my games to be like toys, and include a bunch of figures and dice. And most of the time, I'm always worried that an abstract strategy game I want to get into is going to turn into more of a puzzle than anything else, and I stink at puzzles, me being a guy who's spent the last ten years vainly trying to beat my old Hoyle for PC game at Othello.
I don't know why exactly I pulled the trigger on Ingenious. It might have had something to do with the designer, as I had played several games by Kinzia (Lord of the Rings, Lost Cities, Blue Moon) and enjoyed them enough, even though I'm not enough of a "gamer" to really be able to dissect what makes a game a "Kinzia" game. I just thought it would be fun to have another.
Maybe I felt like i needed to treat my gaming group to something a bit more basic than some of the things I had been forcing them to play. I had been on a run of games that my group has enjoyed, but after a while I wondered if they were getting tired of evening-consumers like Battlestar Galactica. How fun would be to have a game you could just throw out on the table and start playing right out the gate?
To be perfectly honest, what finally sold me was the box. True. No, not the weird looking red one, but the classy looking dark blue one with the word INGENIOUS on in in BIG IMPORTANT letters. I had to admire that. I mean, just going by the box, you don't know what you're getting or what you're going to be playing (to be honest, I had read about seven reviews and I STILL didn't really know what the game involved beyond placing tiles) but geez...there's something very admirable about a game designer just belly-ing up and giving a game that sort of title. Not since "Mastermind" have I heard of a game that the title is so all-in. You might as well of called it "Reiner Kinzia's Best Game Ever."
It's also of note that the leaflet that comes with the game, the one that advertises the iphone app, also says it's "the world's best board game" as well. And while that quote doesn't appear to have any type of MLA or APA citation to it to make it verifiable, it's got a decent enough claim to "one of the world's more unique board games" at least.
Why is that so? Well, we'll get to that.
Concept:
It's a tile-laying game where players take turns taking a tile from their rack and then placing it on the board, where matching color symbols will net you points in the game's six different-colored "suits."
How do you win?
You can win in one of two ways.
1. If you can "peg out" by scoring 18's in all the game's color suits (the rules flat out tell you that's rare), or...
2. Once there is no more room to put any more tiles down the game ends, and whoever has the most points..(kind of) wins. I'll get back to this as well. I promise. It's one of the subtle things that makes the game so clever.
Game Play:
Good lord, you can't get much simpler than this.
1. On your turn you look at your rack of six tiles. You choose one and place it on the board ANYWHERE you want (except for the very first round).
2. You then score points depending on the tile you placed and you keep track of these points by pegging them on your little pegboard.
3. You then "refresh" by drawing a tile from the bag (or by "dumping out" if you are so allowed to).
This ends your turn. Yeah, like I said. Here's what else you need to know.
Here's how points are scored.
Describing how to win and/or play an abstract strategy game is kind of like trying to put a painting into words, so I'm going to describe it this way...
Have you ever played dominoes? You know, like "classic" dominoes where you just match number to number?
Ok, imagine there's a "five" on the table and you play a five from your rack. Imagine that action would score you a point because you attatched a number next to the same number.
Now imagine that each domino didn't just have one side open on the board. Imagine if each domino had up to nine open sides on it once it's on the board. Then imagine the possibilities if say, you put that "five-er" down and you'd score a point for EVERY five that was not only touching the five you put down, but for EVERY other five that was connected to that one, with the points spreading out backwards like ripples in a pond.
For the most part, that's how scoring works in Ingenious. Whenever you place a tile down, you look to see all the colors that touch and match the tile you just placed, and you score points for all the colors that match and then stretch backwards in straight lines until intrupted by a different color. That's the best I can do, folks.
You win by having the most of your least.
Because it's relativly easy to rack up big gains in any of the game's six colors as it goes on, the goal of the game isn't to max out on all of them (although you can win that way).
Instead the game is designed in a way to FORCE players to develop their colors evenly since at the end of the game, all players look on their boards and compare their LOWEST score on their board. Whoever has the HIGHEST score of the lowests wins.
In other words, yeah, you can keep playing red tiles next to that ever-expanding island of reds piling up on one corner of the board, but when you look down and see that while you've been building up your empire of red, you've still got blue and yellow sitting at zero, it sort of forces you to start building elsewhere. Ahh, but what about that player to your left who needs red? Guess where they are going to start playing?
That's not to say you don't get SOME kind of reward for maxing out on a color.
If you do peg out on a color (that's hitting 18), which isn't difficult to do on at least one (maybe two) colors in any given game, you DO get a reward.
You actually get to call out "INGENIOUS!" (which my best friend does VERY loudly when she pulls it off...even on her iphone, mind you) and you get to immediatly take a second turn with the tiles still left on your rack.
That may not sound like a big deal, but....
In the early stages of the game, getting to take a second turn really isn't that big a thing at all. But in the late stages? When players are starting to do final caculations as to just what colors they need to hit to eke out a win (and most times, when you win, the margin is going to be slim) suddenly getting to suck up game oxygen by plunking down two (perhaps three or more if you can "INGENIOUS!" more than once on a turn) tiles in a row, therby blocking off colors that other people need? Well, be prepared for people to curse at you a lot.
So you need to block as well as score points for yourself?
Well...that's a tough one. Blocking IS a part of the game yes, but only in the mid to late stages, in my opinion. See, there are just SO many colors available to all players, it's a hard thing to do to ever totally block off a color (unless some players aren't paying attention) and even if you do, the color can always be "re-started" by someone taking a loss and plunking down a tile that doesn't match any others, just to get a color they need back in the game.
You are allowed to dump out...Scrabble style..
Kind of. But there are specific times when you can so do. You are not allowed to ever just request a rack swap from the bag just because you feel like it, but, if after playing your tile, you look down and look at your remainder five (or fewer if you just got finished taking extra turn) and you realize you don't have any of the color you have the LEAST of, you are allowed to dump off by showing your pieces to everyone else (so they can all see you truely don't have any of your lowest) and then you redraw back up to six before putting the tiles you didn't want back in the bag. This ends your turn. Yeah, it sounds like a bit of a hassle, but hey, at least you don't have to give up your whole turn to do so or anything.
That's more randomness than you might expect from an abstract strategy game.
I'm not enough of a "gamer" to get into discussions about how much "luck" is enough and how much is too much, especially in a game such as this. Ingenious is a tough game to figure out in this aspect. On one hand, it's controlled chaos. At the start of the game, everyone's pretty much got at least one of every color needed, and after the first turn (where players have to start on a different one of the board's "starter spaces") its' everyone sort of in their own little color worlds.
But, and this is one of the more ingenious parts of the game, in my opinion, is how the tone of the game changes as it goes on, based on the way the board itself is laid out.
The game starts with players building in the corners, but as it goes on, and these "islands" of color start to grow outward, they're going to start intersecting with the other "projects" people are working on, which, depending on who was building what, will cause all sorts of problems for some (who want to build a color but cant) and rewards for others (that quiet guy who is sitting at zero greens until there's the big pile of them on the table they can just drop a double green tile down next to. And after that you get to hear that wonderful panic of all the other players suddenly peering around their own racks to see what that lucky player's NEW lowest color is.
Can't you just win by always focusing on your lowest color?
You'd think. There are some who play a more conservative, no-funny business style where each turn they look down at their board, see which one is lowest, and then play a tile of that color, therby slowly, but surely, marching all the colors up semi-evenly in a leapfrogging fashion.
And you know what? You can win that way. Every time, though? Well, I thought I could, up until I played on person who right from the start of the game, cashed in on three colors, completly ignoring the other three, and left them hovering at 16, just waiting for that moment to max them both out at once at a late stage, thus sucking up three turns at once, and then scoring big on the colors they hadn't been working on.
There are team and solitare variations.
I haven't tried the team version (although it sounds fun) which plays like the normal game except you put two score boards together to make one long one, but the solitare version, where you just draw a tile at a time and place it where you can until the board's full, is every bit as addictive, so much so that it's been included on the portible iphone version.
At first I thought the game was mearly clever..cute even..until....
A friend of mine asked me what I thought about the game in comparison to my others, and when I said I liked it, as opposed to loving it, she seemed surprised, given that everyone I know won't shut up about it.
I had to think about that. At first, the reason I was still holding back on the game was that it just seemed way too up-in-the-air for most of it. Players just start hacking away in their own chosen color corners of the board, and since blocking is so hard (unless you really try), you don't even think to much about the other players.
But after playing it four player the other night, I realized a strange thing happening. The game started in its usual "everyone for themselves" way, but as it went on, the colors started to spiral outward, the game started to become more social, with players talking through their moves, even with opponants (because they needed the same colors), and the stratagies seemed to shift every bit as the patterns on the board, because you can't ever just relax and work on one color to win. In the end, Ingenious is like taking part in some strange interactive modern art experiement. I've started taking pictures of the board at the end of each game because of that. Seriousy.
But that's not really what makes it ingenious....
As mentioned, there's something about the way the game looks that just draws people in. And even though advance planning is a hard thing to do in the game, the way each game sort of shifts through different phases is something undeniably unique. I guess it's just the way that even with all that taken into account, it's the type of game where you just can't believe that someone didn't think of it sooner. Maybe that's what makes it so ingenious.
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John Heynes
South Africa
Cape Town
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Great review. I also share your love for the game. I find that people like it more every time they play it.
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Chris G
Canada
Kitchener
Ontario
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Nice review and I also love the game. It plays well, I love the strategy of it plus it's a good family game.
The colour blocking in a two player game is far more important and strategic right from the beginning. This game can get extremely cut throat in that regard. To the point where we often aren't even getting one colour to 18 as long as you can stuff someone else. Once you add in a 3rd person though colour blocking is definitely harder unless you gang up. But the odds of being able to coordinate that is slim since so the game is a little more friendly with 3 or 4 players.
My single complaint is the board itself. I wish that when they redid the game they had created a locking playing board for the full game like they did with the travel game or like Blokus does. The sliding pieces is in now way a deal killer but having them lock would be so much nicer. They made the score board lock in place which given the accidental score slide is nice, but I just wish they did the whole game like that.
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United States
Norwood
Massachusetts
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Nice Review:
I've played this several times and my strategy has developed through a) concentrating on the lowerst scored color at first, then b) pushing for bonus turns, then c) not being fearful of scoring a big number on a color - then you don't have to worry about that color anymore.
That's the thrill of the game - the more you play it, your strategy changes
based on your experience and your opponent.
It's a really good game. I'd even say it's "INGENIOUS!" 
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Sandie Fletcher
New Zealand
Featherston
Wairarapa
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 great review..
I bought this one as one of my first boardgamer purchases..thrashed it - kinda got over it a little and having just read this review am itching to go home and play it again  (maybe no one will notice if i close up early...
I agree the tiles shifting on the board drive me bonkers, I play with my children and one over enthusiastic child can trash a whole game in the wave of an arm... but now they are bigger I'm thinking its worth another shot.
excellent..thanks for reminding me how awesome it is!!
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L Rock
Canada
Ontario
The statement below is true
The statement above is false
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Enjoyed the review but I'm quite certain the designer's name is Knizia, and not Kinzia.
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Johan Haglert
Sweden
Örebro
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Sadly seem a little light on strategy and then little there is is to screw with others :/
Nothing wrong with that  , but if I would be playing my family and tell them the strategy is to mess up for the others I doubt they would enjoy it as much as if they was building for themselves. However if everyone just build for themselves? Where's the game really? Order? Looking at the board? Since things can happen between turns shouldn't there be "optimal" moves as far as scoring for the current turn goes?
Personally I to really like the look of the board though 
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Posted Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:36 am
