This is amazing; today’s giveaway previously received a positive 97% out of 1001 votes. That has got to be a record. Wow. I’ve posted links to several reviews at the end of this review if you want to check others opinions of this game. None gave the same response to this game as the community did last September. (which in my opinion was well deserved – it will be interesting to see what sort of voting we will get this time). I took over 70 screen captures, but most of those were of the tutorial. Most of the pages look the same, but if you look to the bottom right of the image you will see a text box with instructions as to what to do. It’s really easy (IMO) to pick up on how to play this game, though I don’t explain anything about the online play as I didn’t have the opportunity to set up a LAN game.
You can see the 95 comments that were made by following the link below, in particular Bovi comment #6:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ingenious/#comments
The following is a direct quote from Merscom’s game page regarding this game:
Quote:
Are you ingenious? You are when playing this extraordinary game. Combining fun gameplay, great components, and real strategy, Ingenious will have you addicted. Simple rules, quick playing time, and a clever system makes Ingenious ingenious! Marvelously elegant and compulsively replayable, Ingenious is the new puzzle game based on a best-selling award-winning board game. The game features a challenging single-player mode and balanced options for playing with 2, 3 or 4 players. Each player starts with six tiles with color symbols. In clockwise order, players place one of their tiles onto the board, trying to establish lines of matching symbols. Players must advance all six of their color symbols, not leaving any of them behind.
Ref: Merscom LLC http://www.merscom.com/games/ingenious.php 12th March 08
The Game:
This is an excellent logic game that is easy to learn and should give you hours of brain teasing fun, especially if you are playing it against other human players as opposed to the computer AI which is adjustable in three stages. If you’re playing three computer opponents for example you can set each one differently. I bought this a while back, but had forgotten I had it till I saw the image above and thought, “that looks familiar”, lol. The only difference between my version, (from Reflexive) and this is that the one being offered here today has a timer which counts down whenever it is your turn.
The interface is well thought out and the tutorial is excellent and easy to follow. You can follow each stage of the tutorial by following the slideshow that I’ve posted a link to below if you wish. You can download the collection of images (gif) that I took of the tutorial session by following the link to the download page below. You’ll find approximately 50 screen captures that include every page of the in game tutorial. The only mistake I made was not capturing just the message window as it would have made it easier for those with sight problems to see the message window which is located to the bottom right of the image. The file is in the form of a zip file. You don’t need winrar to unzip it. Windows own program should suffice:
http://files.filefront.com/Ingenious+image+tutorilzip/;9803665;/fileinfo.html
There’s a freeware game called Hexagem that is vaguely similar, that if you miss, lose, or just want a free alternative, you can download from the following link:
http://zeratul.cellosoft.com/hexagem.php
The music is pleasant enough to run in the background (I found it melded into the background after awhile, and seemed to fit in with the game very well); however if you wish you can go into the music folder within the games folder and place your own music there. Remember to back up the original though and rename the music you are using to the names that are in the folder (intro, Music 1-4) You will need to convert your MP3’s to WAV using an audio converter, of which there are two or three freely available in the freeware section of this project.
MP3 WMA converter:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/freeware/dir/51535/Download-Free-Mp3-Wma-Converter.htm
MP3 WMA WAV Converter:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/freeware/2007/07/30/free-mp3-wma-wav-converter/
If you want to change the attributes so that you are playing against either a human, a computer AI or no player (i.e. single player) go to the options menu and click on the Add or Remove Player screen If you select four players you can play in either two teams of two or singly, against the other three opponents, or if you're playing with three, you against 2 opponents etc etc. You’ll find a selection of difficulty settings from untimed and three timed settings that are labeled easy medium and difficult (see images via the links below) Once you’ve selected your players names and then started a new game you are given the opportunity to change the names which is a useful attribute if you have children who constantly squabble and wish to change positions and or teams, lol.
The difference between the team play apart from the fact that it’s 2 v 2 is that you have to score 36 for each color as opposed to the 18 in the singles game. The 'High Scores' tables have separate entries for each of the four difficulty setting and for the five different ways of playing the game. i.e. Teams, Solo, 2 player, 3 player and 4 player as well as solo play, then this is repeated for online play apart from the solo play, making a total of thirty nine seperate scoring boards.
Other points:
• Several community members said that their games froze inexplicably at some point during game play and required the task manager to exit. There was a solution from Strathos regarding changing the movie for an unrelated one or downloading movie codec’s, but nothing was ever substantiated. There is a post in the forums that discusses errors when playing ingenious which you can see at the end of this report together with a couple of other errors.
• In the multiplayer game you can place tiles in the open spaces, which you can’t in the single player games.
• The chips draw is totally random, so you’ll never get (well, very unlikely)two draws the same.
• You must score points in all the colors, otherwise you will lose the game even if you’ve scored high points.
• You can earn double or event triple and quadruple turns depending upon how near to completion of a particular color set you are in the game. For example if you only require a 2 for yellow and score the appropriate points, you get an extra turn; if you now fill another color, you will get a second extra turn.
• There are three timed modes and an untimed mode
• It is possible to disable some of the intro AVI’s by either deleting or removing them from the movies file, however they are innocuous, so unless you want to save some space I would leave them where they are.
Images all on one page:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Ingenious/?start=all
Images as a slideshow:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Ingenious/?albumview=slideshow
Slideshow of tutorial images:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Ingenious%20tutorial/?albumview=slideshow.
I've included the googled images because it shows you the board game which some may be interested in. We as a family love playing traditional board games of which we have many. There's no substitute for real family interaction, though we are slowly collecting family games that can be played on the computer as well. The traditional board game looks quite good actually, and the cost when comparing it with Scrabble, Monopoly, Cludo and other popular board games such as Risk and Mr Surgeon is reasonably competitive.
Googled images:
http://search.msn.co.uk/images/results.aspx?q=Ingenious+game&go=&form=QBIR
Minimum requirements:
Operating System …………………. Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows Vista
System Memory……………………………………… 256 MB RAM
Processor ……………………………...Pentium 750MHz
Video Memory……………………… 16MB Card DirectX: 8.0 or late
Conclusion:
This is such a simple idea, yet is so playable. You can play several ways, either against four humans, a combination of human and computer, as a team or in single player as well as online using a local area network. The game play is easy and very absorbing. I checked each style of game play with the intention of just playing for a few moments on each setting, but got carried away and lost all track of time. This game is definitely worth 8 out of 10 for playability and family entertainment in my opinion.
Thank you very much Merscom and the giveaway team for another great giveaway. :)
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Other information:
If you fancy forking out $35 you can get a travelling board version of this game that allows up to two players. (ideal if you're gpoing on holiday and don't want to take your laptop with you. Check it out by following the link below. I think someone posted links to other versions of the board game when this was first given away back in September last year:
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ingenious.html
or check out the links originally provided by Cedric Chin comment #51:
BoardGameGeek:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/9674
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Other reviews worth reading:
http://www.gamezebo.com/reviews/ingenious_review.html
http://killerbetties.com/ingenious_review_pc
http://www.games4girls.com/reviews/ingenious.html
http://www.terragame.com/downloadable/logic/ingenious/index.html
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Problems with this game:
Some community members reported problems with this game. There is a post over in the forums that dealt with some areas, which you can see by following the link below:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/1576?replies=17#post-9755
Also dns comment #52 (from the previous giveaway) said that when he tried to play it in window mode the board remained, though blacked out.
Funner comment #77 received the following error and was kind enough to post a fix:
The error read:
“…failed to start because ad2mpegin.dll was not found…”
here is the fix:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=319912
Add the ad2mpegin.dll and ad2mcmpgdec.dll files to your Windows\System32 directory.