In Ingenious, players take turns placing colored domino-style tiles on a game board, scoring for each line of colored symbols that they enlarge. The trick, however, is that a player's score is equal to her worst-scoring color, not her best, so she needs to score for all colors instead of specializing in only one or two.

Ingenious includes rules for solitaire and team play; in the latter case, two teams of two play, with each player not being able to see his partner's tiles and teams keeping a combined score that maxes out at 36 instead of 18.