We were thinking of something quick. Something… with a bit of think to it. So we looked over the likely candidates, passed over Fairy Tale, and pulled Ingenious off the shelf. Way off the shelf. We have it at the top of a set of bookshelves, the top of which is dedicated to games in square boxes. I assume that we’re among friends so that this confession won’t go too far. I trust you, you know. (I would have taken you to the prom…you know that, right?) Many stacks of square boxes rise above the bookcase and add a bit of color the the beige walls. They look good, but you have to stand on a chair to pull one off.
So, Ingenious.
It’s a clever game (photo by Kilroy_Locke, again), another in the Reiner Knizia oeuvre (he of the “the goal of the game is to win, but it’s the goal that’s important, not the winning” quote) and his math background is clear. Ingenious fits well among a few of his other games, Lost Cities (photo: AngusBull) and Keltis (photo JudgeLP) especially. In all of these games, the mechanics force you to score evenly across all your pieces (and I think that Lost Cities and Keltis began life as the same game). In Ingenious you have double-hex pieces—think dominoes shaped like hourglasses—with shapes in each hex. As in dominoes,
some of the pieces are doubles, but that doesn’t matter much to game play. With each play, at least one side of the piece must match an already-played piece. You score points for each hex with the matching pattern already on the board that lay in any line radiating out from the piece you played. But here’s the (cough) ingenious part: at the end of the game you only keep the lowest-scored pattern. If your lowest score is higher than anyone else’s lowest score
(regardless of which pattern), you win. So you’re always trying to score higher than the others’ lowest score, and you can’t neglect any category. The game moves quickly, and the board looks nice when it’s full—always a plus. We both liked the game, and Dana managed to break her losing streak on a tie-breaker—always a plus.
When I started to invest time and attention in this hobby, I discovered that there was a Do It Yourself component if you wanted to pursue those practices. And I did. So I made tuckboxes (the little boxes that cards come in) for games with a lot of cards and separated the counters, meeples, etc. into little plastic baggies (speeds the set-up time) and I made a dice tray out of an old cigar box and green felt. A good many games require you to draw pieces out of a bowl or bag, but many of the bags that come with these games are translucent at best. Dana likes to work with fabric, and I showed her some of the bags that other people had made on BoardGameGeek (there’s at least one man who makes them, and he chastises men for ignoring the sewing machine as a power tool). It was a geeky kind of inspiration, and it sent us out to the fabric store for material.
The first bag she made was for Arkham Horror, so a lot of murky greens and blues. The next big draw bag she made has French peasants out in fields, so we use that one for Carcassonne. And she sewed up a few others of different sizes with a generic chess theme to them. She followed Diane Close’s tutorial (the bag pictured is one of Diane’s) and then applied the idea to ever larger projects. So our house has about twenty colorful bags filled with Wendy toys and flotsam (the varied bits of toys and toy pieces that have floated off and that you can simply scoop up off the surfaces of the house). Even now, Dana’s sitting at the machine sewing another bag. It seems to have cats, fish, and moons over it. Destined for toys. Or maybe a project bag.
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