Ingenious: A Game of Scarce Resource Management

Over Shavuot, Kalman managed to beat me for the first time at a real board game, Ingenious. This is a great game to play with a five-year-old in that the rules are simple enough that Kalman can follow them while offering serious strategic thinking for the adult. (In my case, I got too smart for my own good.) In addition, the game offers Kalman numerous opportunities to advance pegs on a numbered board by different amounts to keep score, a useful visual for understanding addition.

The basic premise of the game is that you match tiles, each with two colored symbols, with tiles already on the board with one of the same colors. The longer the row of matching symbol you make, the more points you earn. The trick is that, at the end of the game, the only points that matter are the ones from your lowest scoring symbol. Because of this, you need to go after all the symbols and not just the ones in which you are strongest. (This is kind of like the electoral college where you cannot simply pile on votes from your strongest states.) 

It strikes me that Ingenious is very much an economics game. As with any meaningful discussion of economics, the strategic issue at the game's heart is one of resource management under conditions of scarcity. You are going to have to make trade-offs between high scoring moves and getting points where you actually need them. Barring extreme luck, you cannot expect to be able to make ideal moves. You do the best with the tiles you have, knowing that you will have to make tradeoffs.

The really interesting economics issue in this game is the extreme relativity of the value of different colored tiles. The higher you score on any color, the less each additional point is valuable. In essence, the game runs on marginal utility. Points do not have any objective value, beyond how little you have of them. Getting from zero to one is going to be more valuable than getting from one to two.

This question of the relative value of points is further complicated by the layout of the board as it develops in that the board will offer better opportunities for high score moves in certain colors. By contrast, certain colors will be cut off, making it difficult to develop them. This means that, not only do you have to pay attention to how you are scoring in all the colors, you also have to take into account which colors you will likely be able to play in the later part of the game. It may be perfectly acceptable to let yourself lag in a color or two as long as those colors are not likely to be cut off. If a color looks like it will be cut off, then you better get your matching pieces down immediately so you can monopolize that color before your opponents do the same. 

It should be acknowledged, though, that the "economics" of  Ingenious ultimately come across as rather mercantilist. Unlike even Settlers of Catan, there is no trading or opportunities to cooperate. On the contrary, you need to develop the tile resources on the board for yourself at the same time that you sabotage everyone else's attempts to benefit from that same source. In essence, you are the equivalent of an oilman who sets up a Baptist/Bootlegger coalition with environmentalists in order to stop further drilling and raise the value of the oil you already possess.

 

This can only be expected from a board game as they are fundamentally zero-sum exercises in which one person wins and everyone else loses. By contrast, economics (contrary to what Trump believes) is about how everyone can be a winner, particularly if we look after the "low scorers." And this may be Ingenious' most important lesson. You may have "rich" and "poor" colors as some level of inequality is inevitable. That being said, in the end, we will be judged on our ability to raise the standard of living for those who have least.