Game Review: Ingenious (PC version)

By W. Eric Martin
August 7, 2007

Publisher: Merscom
Platform: Windows XP/2000/Vista
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: Varies (see below)
Rules Language: English
Price: $19.99
Number of Plays: Twentyish with multiple configurations

Ingenious seems like the perfect title to be transformed into a video game. Instead of having to set up the components before the game—or, more tediously, later pick up dozens of flat plastic tiles with minimal success because they’re only five microns thick, which inspires you to try to use the gameboard to funnel pieces into the cloth bag only to have tiles shoot through the opening in the board and bounce into someone’s pant leg so that you’re searching for the cursed thing for five minutes—the computer handles all the busy work for you, letting you focus on nothing more than playing the game.

Ah, yes, the game—Ingenious is an abstract strategy game in which players are placing domino-style tiles on a gameboard in order to score points. The tiles each have two colored symbols on them, and when you place a tile, you score one point for each matching colored symbol in the five rows radiating away from each half of the tile. Points are applied to the color scored, and if you max out a color’s score at 18, you take another turn.

The game ends when no more tiles can be played on the hexagonal grid, which is different sizes depending on the number of players, and the player who has the highest low score among all six of his colors wins the game. To win, you must advance all six of your color scores equally, ideally while shutting off a color for other players at the same time to keep their scores low.

Merscom’s PC version of Ingenious is a direct port of the boardgame into a computer game (with one small exception I’ll mention later). If you know the rules for the former, all you need to do is learn how to use the computer controls to place the pieces and you’re ready to go.

Oh, wait, you do need other players, right? Not necessarily. While you can play a solitaire version of the game on the smallest gameboard, with a goal of having the highest low score possible, you can also play against one to three computer-controlled opponents. For each opponent, you can choose one of three difficulty levels. Despite many games against the computer, I couldn’t detect an obvious difference between the lowest and highest difficulty ratings; even opponents on the lowest rating made smart plays and not bonehead moves.

Choose your challenge

One special option for the computer game is that you can impose one of three time limits on the game. You must make all of your moves within a certain amount of time, or else you lose the game. Since digital opponents take their turns almost instantly, the time limit keeps your head spinning as you try to process their moves, the playing piece added to your rack at the end of your turn, and the other pieces you already held. I lost several games in a row on time before I finally got into a speedy groove in which you’re playing intuitively rather than analytically.

As far as playing against other humans, the game suggests two options, neither of which is ideal. First, you can take turns on the same computer. This option requires multiple mice so that everyone can choose and move pieces without feeling crowded, but since your tiles are on display during your turn, other players would need to either turn their heads or just pretend not to see—options that aren’t ideal since you need to see who played which tiles in order to play at your best.

The other option is to play against remote opponents, each of whom is playing on their computer with their own copy of Ingenious. One of the players needs to act as the server or host, while everyone else connects to the host over the Internet to play. Unlike BrettSpielWelt, SpielbyWeb, and other online gaming websites, Ingenious doesn’t have the ability to let you play against random people online; you can’t hang out in an online lobby and wait for others to show up for a tile thrashing. You need to know the other players and cooordinate your schedules ahead of time in order to play. Thus, all of my twenty-something games were either solo games or games against 1-3 AI opponents.

The controls for Ingenious—with one mouse button to select and drop a tile and the second button to rotate the tile—took me a couple of games to get used to, perhaps because I normally use a Mac laptop and haven’t handled a mouse in years. But throwing away a couple of games to learn how to use the controllers was no big deal. As is common with digital adaptations of boardgames, games of the computerized Ingenious were much shorter than the original, so each game lasted at most 15 minutes, with timed games ending much more quickly.

My mother-in-law—a fan of Spider, Honeycomb Hotel, Bookworm, and other solitaire computer games—also tried out Ingenious as I don’t own a PC and had to install the game on her computer. She’s a relative novice when it comes to any computer function beyond the basics, but she caught on to the game controls, as well as the game play, quickly and racked up more games in a single evening than I did over three days.

The computer game differs from the boardgame in only one quirky way, as far as I could tell. Normally in solo or team games, when you combine two scoring boards to track your points, you must throw away any points over 18 that you score in a color, then on following turns you can start scoring in that color again, maxing out for good at 36. Thus, if you have 16 points in red and score 5, your red score goes only to 18; if you score 3 more red next turn, your red score will now be 21. This scoring plateau is eliminated in the computer game with every point being added to your score until you hit the 36 ceiling.

While Merscom’s Ingenious is a fine adaptation of the boardgame, especially for someone like me who enjoys puzzle-type games, the lack of an easy and supported system for online play with strangers is a real failing. Members of my game group are unlikely to purchase a copy of Ingenious, so the possibility of random games with others would be my only shot at multi-player games. My mother-in-law, on the other hand, has no interest in playing against others (and probably couldn’t set up these games anyway), but she’s happy to have found a new game to play. Have fun, Janet, and I’ll try to break any records you set the next time I see you!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	A sample screen shot from Merscom
	Both AIs beat the humans—expect this to happen a lot at first

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