That’s ingenious!

With still two Arkham horror expansions to go (The goat is not released yet), I have decided to sidetrack to take a look at one of Reiner Knizia’s games. Reiner Knizia is an award winning games designer with his own web site.  But on to the game of double hexes. And I don’t mean witchcraft or sorcery. Tis Ingenious.  (Another Fantasy Flight Game.  They really should pay me to do this :p) 2005 Mensa Select winner but that along with a game called “Loot” so I don’t know if that really counts.

Now that’s a pretty box: elegant yet simplistic.  Makes me feel smart just holding it.  Inside the box, one finds a board of hexes that form a giant hex. Hexcellent (I ignore your groans). Four score cards, four plastic stands, a nice black bag (I wish Arkham Horror came with a bag like this for the monsters), score keeping blocks of all the right colours and last but not least, loads and loads (120) of game pieces made up of two hexes glued together on one edge.  As one can tell from the picture, each hex has one of six colours/symbols. That’s two symbols per game piece. Colours always match the symbol for easy identification. Think Dominoes here, but with hexes and more colour.

What's in the box?

So now that we know what’s in the box, how do we score? By taking a look at the examples of scoring picture:

Got it?  Let me explain. Scoring is quite simple, yet takes a bit of getting used to. That makes it not so simple right? OK, moderately simple then.  From the double-hex piece that you place, you draw a straight line from one of the hexes to an adjacent hex with the same symbol as your hex and continue with the line until the next hex in the line does not have the same symbol as your hex.  For each hex your line passes through, you gain one point for that colour (not including the piece you just placed). One can never draw a line through your last placed piece since all lines are drawn from it. After drawing all possible lines from both hexes on ones last placed piece, your turn is done and the next player may place One Piece.

But how does one win? By having the highest lowest value.  Think about it. It makes sense.  the point of the game is not to have one value at maximum but to have all values as high as they can go.  In the example above the red is at 3 points and this is what is looked at when the game is over. On a tie, the next lowest value is looked at etc.  So get all of ‘em blocks as high as you can, usually if they go past 9 they are relatively safe, usually.

But getting to 18 is not all bad. Since in that case, one must shout “ingenious” and may then immediately get another turn.  Of course getting all 6 colours to 18 means you are an instant weinner (haven’t seen this happen yet).  The game ends normally when no more pieces can be placed on the board.

This game is short, about 45 minutes even with analysis paralysis which makes it an hexcellent filler game (much like Carcassonne). Best played with 2-4 people but does include rules for a 1 player game.

But if this game seems too “thinky” (I believe the word is “mental”) or abstract for some people, they can always make pretty shapes out of the hexes.

Until next time: Post your shapes

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