Ingenious

Less than a decade old, Ingenious is the sort of simple yet deceptively deep strategy title that’s easy to pick up and hard to put down.

Designed by boardgame legend Reiner Knizia (Lord of the Rings, Tower of Babel), it's one of those games that hooks you back into the world of tabletop action and acts as a 'gateway' to more complex titles.

But while this mobile Android version adequately recreates the look, rules, and subtle tactics of the source game, the lack of online play diminishes its long-term lustre.

At its heart, Ingenious comes across as a multiplayer variation of the match-three puzzler.

Different coloured symbols (circles, hexagons, stars) adorn key points on the edges of a large, hex-filled board. From a pool at the bottom of the screen, your job is to place tiles containing pairs of identical or different symbols next to their matching counterparts on the board.

Once you've placed a tile, you get points for every matching tile it touches - with long lines of the same coloured shape earning bigger scores.

By rotating tiles, using the game’s simple but effective touchscreen controls (tap to pick up, swipe to rotate), you can help chains grow across the board, or halt your opponent’s progress by blocking off their next move.

Although the game ends in standard fashion, either by running out of tiles or hexes to fill, the scoring system is decidedly idiosyncratic.

Instead of simply aiming for the highest score by making long lines of one symbol, you need to bag points using all the different shapes. After the game, the player with the lowest score using any of the symbols loses, irrespective of how many other points he's picked up.

It’s a clever twist, which forces you to adopt a varied playing strategy across the whole board, and is neatly explained in the text tutorial - although some tactical hints wouldn’t have gone amiss as the learning curve can be quite steep.

With its straightforward looks and soothing sub-Air soundtrack, Ingenious relies on its unique strategic mechanics to hold your interest.

It succeeds, too, for a while at least, as you beat the AI on Easy and progress to Normal and Hard, or take on the lengthy Tournament mode.

However, while you can play with a pal on one handset, the lack of wi-fi multiplayer (or online leaderboards) saps the game’s long-term appeal.

Ingenious is a fun, inventive little puzzler but - just like the Android spins on Carcassonne and Catan before it - the AI-only competition never really matches up to the thrill of playing against real people.