Ingenious: Single-Player Travel Edition
- Designer: Reiner Knizia
- Publisher: Kosmos
- Players: 1
- Age: 8+
- Time: 1 to 5 minutes per challenge
- Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4myaaGM
- Played with review copy provided by publisher
Spark your inner genius with this pocket-sized puzzle game. Your goal is to place the colorful domino-style tiles in exactly the right places to complete each challenge. With 200 challenges in four difficulty levels and a compact case, this game provides hours of puzzle-solving fun, virtually anywhere. Play solo, or pass the game around to challenge your family and friends. Put your logical thinking skills to the test! Can you master all of the challenges?
This handheld plastic case contains 200 challenges for you to solve. There are 25 double sided cards in the box and each card has four different challenges to solve. Essentially, you set up each challenge by placing designated tiles onto the board. There are small numbers printed on the card to show you the starting tiles in each of the four challenges on that card.
Then, your job is to use all the rest of the pieces onto the board (of course matching the tiles to the icons beneath them). That’s it. There is no scoring other than completion or not. If you get really stuck, the back of the rulebook has solution diagrams for all the puzzles. The rulebook for the game does suggest that if you had a friend who had their own copy, you could turn this into a 2-player head to head race.
There are four levels of difficulty. The lower levels only use 10 tiles (no tiles with blue in them), but as you move up the difficulty ladder, you will then bring these extra tiles into play and then have larger areas which you must cover up.
The puzzles start out quite easy, and many of the green levels can be solved in under a minute. Once you get to the final level, they are certainly more challenging – and solve times of 5 minutes were not uncommon.
The game uses the familiar iconography and domino pieces of Ingenious, but I think it’s important to note that you do NOT play Ingenious here in any way. You’re simply trying to place all of the domino pieces onto the board to match the diagram beneath. That’s all there is to the game.
This handheld puzzle would make a fine diversion for a road trip or a long flight. You can challenge yourself to solve the cards as fast as you can. Once you’ve played through it all, I suspect that only the hardest level would remain interesting – but at least you should be able to replay them. I think it’s unlikely that you would remember the specific solution to any of the advanced challenges, so you’d be able to keep playing this over and over if you like.
Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor
Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4myaaGM
