Digitally Disillusioned

Over the past few years the designer board game market has been garnering increasing visibility in the video game demographic. Microsoft secured an exclusive license for Klaus Teubers’ Catan franchise, and other games like Carcassonne and Alhambra are slated for future release on Xbox Live Arcade. However, we’re not yet at the point where I can get away with starting this article without explaining what designer board games are (think “actually fun”), and a discussion of such games invariably involves strange sounding titles not yet familiar with most of the readership.

In this climate I find the latest ShadeTree Games/Merscom release to be a bit of a softball: lobbed out into the air with the hopes that someone will take a crack at it. Merscom is a publisher that publishes a lot of games, most of them you’ve never heard of released at a very low price point and target outside the core demographic for gaming. This is what is intriguing about Ingenious - based on the board game by Reiner Knizia - the opportunity to deliver extremely high value games while still releasing at $19.99.
Lets just get it out in the air: the whole $20-$30 game market (and by this I mean release price, not later discounts) is rife with a bunch of games nobody has ever heard of, titles being targeted at lazy Wal-Mart shoppers who will be swayed by the pretty box art. They are a sort of low hanging fruit, never striving to achieve much and never garnering really any critical attention whatsoever from the gaming journalism scene.

So what is so exciting about Ingenious? Originally designed under commission from Mensa, Ingenious is an extraordinarily clever board game of placing shapes into patterns attempting to maximize your score. Typical of such games, it takes about 60 seconds to understand the basic rules and an extremely long time to get any good at playing it. Winner of the 2004 Schweizer Spielepreis, a Top 5 finisher in  Deutscher Spiele Preis, and recipient of the 2006 BoardGameGeek Golden Geek award for Best Family Game, Ingenious is a very straightforward but extraordinarily fun game.

Ingenious is still available in board game format published by Fantasy Flight Games, and its the sort of game you can drag over to dinner with your parents without having eyes roll - at least after they’ve tried it once. Featuring chunky plastic tiles with simple shapes and colours, Ingenious is completely approachable unless you don’t have hands.

It is good to see someone like Microsoft putting emphasis behind their Xbox Live edition of Catan, and it is thrilling to see the smaller publishers sneaking out equally engaging titles. The simplicity intrinsic to a game playable on the tabletop should make these titles extremely appealing to the budget game publisher, and while
I’ve not played the digital version yet it would be a shame if Ingenious landed in the discount bin due to a lack of gamer education. In design, at least, it is one of the best board game conversions available.
Hopefully I can find a copy and provide a review soon.

More information on Ingenious can be found on the Wikipedia here.