Einfach Genial

Einfach-Genial-1-WEB
Originally uploaded by coljen.

After City & Guilds Jo produced Einfach Genial, a Renier Knizia game that is purely abstract. Not even a pretence of a theme here and it doesn't suffer at all from that. Here is a description from BGG:
The game is played on a hex board. 120 equally sized pieces, each consisting of two joined hexes come with the game. There are symbols on each hex that makes up the piece – some pieces have two identical symbols, some have two different symbols (not unlike dominoes). The pieces go into a cloth bag so that they get drawn randomly. Each player receives six pieces to start the game, which are placed onto a rack and visible to them alone.

The goal of the game is, through clever placement, to obtain points in the different symbol colours. Points are claimed by placing a piece such that the symbols on it lie next to already-placed pieces with the same symbol. Pieces are placed onto any open spaces. So, for example, if a player places a piece with a purple circle on it such that it sits next to an unbroken line of four other purple circles already on the board, then the player scores four purple points. A newly placed symbol can lie next to at most five individual rows of symbols.

As we were 4 we played the team version. Jo/Garry versus Steve/Colin. I quite liked this one, the board and pieces are very nice and play flows smoothly with lots of strategy to consider. Our game was very close in the end, only 1 point in it. Steve and I lagged behind in purple for quite a while, but it opened up and became our best colour. We finally got stuffed on blue, neither of us had any blue tiles or places to put them.

Final Scores
Garry/Jo 21 Colin/Steve 20