Red stars, green spheres, blue six-pointed stars, orange octagons, yellow suns, purple circles — no, I'm not talking about the latest sugar-coated cereal for kids. These are the pieces you have to play with in a game called Ingenious. And while you don't have to be ingenious to play, the more you've exercised your brain lately, the easier the game will be to win.
The game is played on an hexagonal board with each of the six colors starting on their own side. You are given six tiles to pick from at the bottom of the board — each with two colors on them. Each turn, you place one of your tiles on the board, trying to match the color on the tile to the tiles already on the board. You earn points for each side you match. If you earn 18 points before the end of the game, you get a bonus turn.
You can play against the computer or other human players. The trick is that in order to win, your score isn't based on having the most points in a color, but on not having the lowest score in any one color. This means you can't focus on just building up one or two colors and ignoring the rest, because then you won't have enough points in your lowest scored color to win. And if you and your opponent have the same low score, it is the second lowest score that's compared to see who wins. Keeping track of all the colors and making sure you are building a balanced board is far from easy.
I've currently only played against the computer, because each time I look for an online game, there's no one available. There is an option to play against other players offline, but this is tricky to do in my house, because my children like to cheat. You see, the game skips from player to player automatically after one player makes a move, so my kids will watch the screen long enough to be able to see what tiles I have available to me, thus figuring out moves that will not only help them, but make it more difficult for me to win. I call it cheating; they call it being clever.
I suppose one could say that this is part of where being ingenious comes in. My preference would have been to have the player make their move, and the screen gray out for a second with a "next player, your turn" button pop up so that no one could see what tiles their opponent has. But I suppose this way does add another layer of strategy to the game. You can have up to four players competing against one another, either all taking their own turns, or as teams. If you play with three or four players, the game board is two rows larger than just the two-player version, so it does add more challenge.
Ingenious is a casual game that falls into the category of easy to play, hard to master. It doesn't take much for me to describe the rules, for example, and the short tutorial quickly covers anything I might have missed. But until I can beat the computer four out of five games on the lowest level challenge mode — a goal I set for myself — I'm not planning to move to a smarter computer-based opponent. I tried one game, in which the computer was set to medium difficulty, and the moves were timed, and it felt rather hectic. It was fun, just much more challenging.
I've played Ingenious as one of those games in which I only have five or 10 minutes to do something and want to keep my brain busy. It's great for that but does get repetitive for longer than about 20 minutes worth of play at a time. But the game is well worth the price, because it has the potential for really being an endless challenge. If you feel you master the game on the easy difficulty, you can always increase difficulty or play a timed game instead. After playing for a few hours spread out over the last week, I can assure you that I feel far from being an ingenious sort of person. But that's not going to stop me from trying.
I’ve played computer games since college, addicted first to story type games like Might and Magic. I have 3 children who also love computer games. My oldest son is a typical kid who loves the challenge of pressing the right combination of buttons and levers on a joystick in just the right way to make something happens, and frequently gets frustrated with mom’s slow fingers. ;) We use computers for both education and entertainment, and sometimes even bribery for good behavior.
The “glory days” of computer gaming for me were when games like Spectre Supreme, Pirate’s Gold, the Might and Magic series, the original Prince of Persia… those sorts of games were coming out on a regular basis. Back then I owned a Macintosh and was a die hard Mac fan. I was one of the first in my area to buy an iMac and on it learned the joy of playing games on the internet like daily crossword puzzle and “mind bender” type puzzles. My first online RPG was given to me for Christmas the year EQ was released, and I was hooked from day one. I played EQ for about a year. I started playing DaoC during late alpha testing, and was hooked on it.. well, to be honest I still am. I’ve tried pretty much every MMORPG I can get my hands on, from big names like EQ, to more obscure ones such as Underlight. I’ve been writing for IMGS since the first DaoC guide, and find I love the challenge of learning a game and presenting what I’ve learned (and sometimes my opinions), to other players.
I’m not a very strong player as far as learning PvE or quick reaction times, so I tend to stay away from games where I’m pitted against someone else in a way that requires physical (rather than mental) response. I still enjoy story and puzzle games, and in a way that’s how I still approach online games. I would much rather spend hours working through a quest than 5 minutes in combat against another player. I still get lost in simulation type games, obsessing over them until I’ve gotten them beaten. And I like being able to sit down at the computer when I’ve got less than half an hour and playing through a few levels of a puzzle game. I tend not to like first-person shooter type games, or anything with person to person violence, so I steer away from them unless they are fantasy based settings. All in all, I enjoy computer gaming so much that my life feels incomplete somehow when my computer is down.
