Puzzles with a German Flair - Part 2: Reiner Knizia's Ingenious

This post is part two of the series I am doing on the puzzle games from German game designer, Reiner Knizia. If you are familiar with German style board games, then his name is very familiar. If not, check out his website, to learn more. Many of his board games have been ported to iOS and now are making their way to Android. Today I am covering the new game Ingenious.

Title: Ingenious | Developer: USM | Genre: Brain & Puzzle | Players: 1-4 | Version: 1.0.1 | Size: 13 MB | Price: $0.99 |

Ingenious does have some similarities to ClusterMaster but it took me a bit longer to figure out. If you are interested, here are the directions to the board game. In this puzzle game, you begin with six tiles with color symbols in your rack. You place the tiles on the play board with the objective of establishing lines of matching color symbols.

The key to the game is to work on all six colors/symbols. I learned this the hard way (by losing a good number of games to the AI). The game ends when there are no open spaces on the playing board. The player with the lowest score in any one of the colors is the loser.  Make sense? If not there is a nice tutorial in the game and the rules are listed also. The best way to learn though is to play.

Just as in ClustMaster, Ingenious comes with different modes of play:

Solitaire- You play by yourself with the option of having varying time limits or not.
Single player- In this mode, you play against the computer. You can change difficulty settings and the option of having varying time limits or not.
Two Player - Pass and play option with the option of having varying time limits or not.
Tournament- This mode has three levels: Beginner (easy), Pro (medium), and Genius (hard). Here you have to play a series of rounds in order and win the final to be the winner of the event. You begin with the Local qualifier, then National, then World, and finally the Olympics.

Moving your tiles is also similar to ClusterMaster. To move, you tap on piece from tray. Once it is selected, you use the green arrows to rotate the tile. Finally, simply drag the rotated tile to the board and tap to place. Just before you place your tiles, you will see the tiles around the area glow. This will give an indication what sort of score you will get. The more tiles that glow the better.

In the bottom portion of the screen, you will see a progress bar for each color. As you place tiles and score points, your progress will be recorded. When the bar for a certain color reaches the right hand side, it is “ingenious” and you can continue playing. If playing the computer, it will automatically take its turn, when you are done. When the game is over, the player with the smallest amount of progress in any one of the color loses.  That is why you need to work on all colors.

Overall the game is well done and fun to play. As I said, it took me a few games to get the hang of it.  There are other very nice features to this game:

- You can have multiple profiles
- Can only have one game going at a time per profile
- The music/sound effect  can be turned on/off
- You can change the general theme of the game
- It comes in English, German, French, and Spanish
- There is a high score section for each mode

I really enjoyed playing this game and am curious how this plays as an actual board game. (I like not having to count and keep up with scores!) Overall the developers did a nice job putting Ingenious together and have some very nice options within the game. I would say it is definitely worth $0.99. So if you enjoy puzzles, Ingenious and ClusterMaster should be on your list. Will we be watching the market to see if more puzzle/board games from Reiner Knizia come out. If they do, I will cover them.