However, if you’re looking for an intriguing abstract game, or trying to help your friends and family make the painful leap from Snakes And Ladders to something more substantial, Ingenious is an excellent choice. There’s a bit more strategy to this deceptively simple game than there appears at first blush, and it’s more painless to teach than Power Grid or Puerto Rico. Plus, a game only takes 20 minutes to half-an-hour, so it doesn’t require a huge time investment from novices.

Here’s how it plays: you have a rack of tiles, like in Scrabble, but instead of letters they have coloured symbols, and they’re double-ended. On your turn, you play one of these tiles on the board. For each tile of the same colour extending in a straight line from the one you just played, you get a point in that colour. In addition, if you hit 18 points in any colour, you can yell “Ingenious!” and have another go.

At the end of the game, you take whichever colour you have the least points in and that’s your score. Which means you could have a bajillion red star points, but if you’ve only got two purple circles, your score’s two. It’s a scoring system Tigris And Euphrates fans will be well familiar with – in fact, Ingenious is probably a good stepping stone to Renier Knizia’s denser works.

There are some tough decisions in Ingenious, like whether to be an arsehole and block your opponents from getting the points they need or try to win like a gentleman by focussing on your own lacklustre scoring categories. Fortunately, the pain of not having the tiles you need is mitigated by a rule allowing you to trade in your hand if you have none of your lowest colour at the end of your turn.

Don’t expect a lot of chatter over the table with this one – Ingenious is a game that has people frowning in concentration, trying to figure out the best placement for their pieces. And for those of you sitting alone in a small, dark room, Ingenious has rules for solitaire play, which works like a logic puzzle with random elements. Instead of a rack of tiles, you draw one at a time from the bag and play it wherever you can.

Surprisingly, given the usual standard of solo play in boardgames, this version is just as much fun – though I imagine it loses some of its thrill once you score maximum points and have no opponent at whose expense to do a celebratory fist pump.