Are you ingenious? Prove it, and have your ingenuity proclaimed online for all to see! Fantasy Flight Games is excited to announce The Ingenious Solo Challenge!

The rules for Reiner Knizia’s “amazing game for 1 to 4 brains!” are simple, but this simplicity masks a wealth of strategic depth. If you’ve already played it, go ahead and skip the brief rules overview in the next three paragraphs. But if you haven’t, glance over them; you’ll quickly see why The Games Journal called Ingenious “Knizia’s most elegant game.”

The Rules

Ingenious is played on a grid of connected white hexagons. Players take turns placing tiles, which consist of two attached black hexagons with colored symbols, in an attempt to match up the tiles with like colors. Think dominoes, but with colors and shapes! The difference is that in Ingenious , you score your placement based on lines (or more accurately, rays) of like colors that connect to the tile you placed.

In this excerpt from the rules (which can be downloaded here ), you can get a clear idea of how scoring works. From each tile that you lay, count the like colors that appear in straight lines connected to your tile. It’s important to remember that each hex on a tile (there are two per tile) has only five open sides, since a tile always blocks itself in one direction. This is true even if a tile has the same color twice (see the example in the lower right corner of the diagram to the right).

That’s it! The key to Ingenious , you’ll find, is maximizing your score with any given tile placement. In the board game, you have to keep the score for each individual color more-or-less even. For this challenge, we’ll simplify things a bit.

The Challenge

Below you’ll find a standard Ingenious board suitable for a four-player game (meaning that the entire board is used). Most of the board is filled, but there’s more that can be done.

You’ll be given six tiles. It’s your job to place them in whatever order you think is best to maximize your score. As you can see, the blank spaces on the board are numbered; likewise, your six tiles are labeled with letters... so if you wanted to indicate the placement of a tile, simply match up the letters (tiles) to the numbers (spaces). For example, to place your first tile in the far upper-right corner, you might write “A3B4,” or “A4B3,” depending on which direction you wanted to flip that tile.

So here’s the deal: Figure out where each of these tiles should go, and the order in which they should be placed (order will matter, as you’ll be able to score off of your previously placed tiles!). In an email to [email protected] , list your placements (as in the format seen above) in order. Additionally, include the following: Your individual scores for red, green, blue, orange, yellow, and purple, as well as your total score: the sum of all the colors you’ve listed. Finally, include your first name and location. We’ll only be double-checking the highest claims, so be sure your point count is accurate.

The winner of this challenge will be judged by the best total score (the sum of all points from individual colors). The contest will end (meaning no more entries will be received) on Wednesday, July 1st at 6pm CST. If any of the above information is missing, your entry will not be accepted. Any ties will be broken based on the order of entry. Soon thereafter, we’ll announce the owner of the most amazing brain right here, on our website!

Good luck!

Your tiles and the board appear below: