For our fifth game, I picked a little-played game, The Reef. Unfortunately, the rules have been mislaid and it was late, so I switched to a quick game of the two player travel version of Reiner Knizia's best-selling classic, Ingenious (aka Einfach Genial).
One of the few abstract games I really love, in Ingenious the players play one tile per turn down onto the grid board, scoring points for placing colors next to the same color. If there are multiple tiles with the same color adjacent or in a row from the newly played tile, you can get multiple points for that placement. Once you get 18 points in a color, you say "Ingenious!" and immediately may play another tile. There is also a rule for swapping out tiles if you're unlucky and can't draw a tile with your lowest scoring color.
Early in the game, here you can see that Carol (far pegs) and I (near pegs) have both moved far ahead in orange, but some colors haven't scored yet at all.
At the end of the game, your score is whichever color you have the LEAST points in, meaning you have to play a balanced game, bringing all your colors up as far as possible. You can have all 18s, but if your final color is 2 and your opponent has brought all her colors up to 3, you lose.
At game end, all of my colors had scored well, including two (orange and green) maxed out at 18. Carol's purple and red scores were her Achilles heel.
Final scores:
Ipecac 7-8-10-10-18-18
Carol 3-6-10-14-17-18
Ipecac wins the fifth game, 7 to 3.
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