Calkins Wins His First Ingenious Title!

Do you think of Ingenious as a Euro, cooperative, aiming-for-Ingeniouses game? Or, as one player this year put it, as a "stabby, stabby wargame"?

The further you advance in the tournament, the more that latter view predominates. Never mind getting Red to 16, get your yellow to 5 and lock everyone else out at 3. And for the first time ever, no game in any round ended with someone achieving all 6 colors to 18, so maybe that wargame mindview is gaining ground.

We did have to turn away two players for lack of a game, but it could have been worse; thanks to all of those who brought copies. And there's a possibility that for next year we may have custom 3D-printed score trays for the little cubes, which I personally would love.

As to the tournament, the all-winners format for the Quarterfinal worked well with 36 qualifiers turning up to take their last chance for glory, one table perhaps overanalysing slightly to give me the only need for adjudication of the week. Our three Finalists (Matt Calkins, past-champion Rebecca Roppolo, and top-seeded Bronwyn Woods) sat down for the week's Final game. Congratulations to Matt for emerging on top and claiming his first Ingenious Championship 153 entrants is *just* short of the all-time high, but demand remains high.

And in closing, one oddity: over all games, Green emerged as an outlier for lowest-scoring color, on average.