Concept

10th September 2019

Tuesday evening at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking is upon us. This means it's time to play board games.

Concept is, in a nutshell, charades as a board game.

What's in a game?
All of Concept's components are quite nice and colourful.

• Game board: A white board covered several columns of lots of colourful small images that serve as pictographs for the game.
• Acrylic Markers. There are 5 'pawns' in 5 different bright colours. One pawn is shaped like a question mark and is called the 'concept' pawn. The other 4 pawns are called 'sub-concept' pawns. There also small acrylic cubes in the same 5 colours to go with the 5 pawns (I guess this game is too hip for good ol' fashioned wooden cubes!). The cubes are used to expand on the pertinent concept.
• Deck of cards: These are the concept cards. Each card has a total of 9 concepts printed on it. There are 3 concepts for each difficulty on a card.
• Scoring tokens. These are cardboard tokens that depict 'light bulbs' and are worth a point each. There are 12 other tokens that  are 'double light bulbs' and are unsurprisingly worth 2 points each.

​How's it play?
Set up is quick and simple.

• Put all of the players into teams of 2 (Should be seated next to each other.). Concept supports up to 12 players!
• Select a difficulty.
• Put out the board, pawns and cubes. Shuffle and put out the deck.
• Separate the point tokens into 1 point and 2 point piles.

That's it. Time for the rules.

In concept, if you are trying to guess the 'concept. then you are playing 'alone'.

If, however you are on 'the team', then you are trying to get the other players to guess the phrase or word.

• The team draw a card and select a 'concept' from the 3 available (For the difficulty being used for this game.).
• Using the pawns and cubes, the team members take turns placing the them on the game board to try and get the other players to guess what the concept is.
• How Concept works. In Concept, the team uses the 'question mark' pawn to signify the main concept and the other pawns for sub concept. Each pawn also has a number of cubes. The cubes expand on the concept and make it clearer. This is done by placing both pawns and cubes on various pictographs on the game board. Luckily there are lots and lot of pictographs depicting all sorts of things to use. Here's an example from the rule book. Main concept goes on 'building' and one of its cubes goes on steel. A sub concept pawn goes on 'location', three of the cubes go on 'red', 'white' and 'blue'. So the concept is 'building and steel' and the sub concept is 'location and red, white and blue'. The answer is 'Eiffel Tower'. A building made of steel which is in France.
• The player who correctly guesses the concept takes a 2 point token. Both players on the team take a 1 point token each.

Endgame
Play continues until all the 2 point tokens have been taken. Then all players tally their scores. Highest score wins.

Overall
By the standards of the game that we usually play, Concept is fairly simple game
But Concept is a fun, easy to play party game that has crossover appeal.
That it plays with up to 12 is a boon.