It’s hard to take a game seriously when its rulebook contains an editor’s note suggesting players completely abandon its scoring system and play for just “the pleasure of guessing and being guessed.” And by “take seriously” I don’t mean that party games are meant to be “taken seriously” by their players, but that including such a note casts some serious doubt over the designers’ understanding of — and confidence in — the appeal of their own game. Now, I fully understand that party game stalwart Telestrations conveys a similarly flippant attitude toward its own scoring rules and “winning” conditions and other things that make a game a game, but let’s not forget that Telestrations is essentially just a commercial production of the public domain game Eat Poop You Cat (why they changed the name is anyone’s guess) and, as such, wasn’t designed as much as just came to be via pre-internet meme magic like that awesome “S” we all drew in grade school. The scoring of Telestrations feels tacked on because it IS tacked on. It’s not even really a game. No one plays Telestrations to win, they play it to trick their friends’ parents into drawing wieners. Which is as noble a cause as any, if you ask me. Okay, I’m getting side-tracked. The case of Telestrations is all well and good, but why not extend the same leniency to Concept (the game this is a review of, remember)? Well, for two reasons: first, this game was designed and therefore its mechanics — including the scoring system — should feel intentional in their implementation. And secondly (and FAR more importantly), the game is little more than an overly-restrictive Pictionary for people scared of drawing.
Here’s Concept in a nutshell: you lay a big board with a grid of small illustrations on it in the middle of the table. Then on a team’s turn one of their players draws a card, chooses a word/phrase on it, and attempts to use a set of colored plastic figurines and cubes to try and get their team to guess the word/phrase by using them to call varying degrees of attention to specific illustrations on the board that pertain at least tangentially to the chosen word/phrase. You have a green question mark figurine to highlight a “main concept”, a handful of exclamation mark figurines to highlight “sub-concepts”, and a bunch of plastic cubes matching the colors of the the question and exclamation mark figurines so you can expand your highlighted concepts to include more than one illustration on the board.
Quick Example: you are trying to get players to guess Herman Melville’s classic work of American Literature Moby Dick. You might use the green question mark to highlight the illustration of a book as your main concept, so your team knows they are trying to guess a book. Then, you could place the red exclamation mark on the illustration representing an animal. Following this, you place three red cubes on the color white, the illustration representing largeness in size, and the illustration representing water. You are careful to use the same color cubes as the exclamation mark in order to associate those four illustrations together. Now, your team can clearly see they are trying to guess a book that has a large, white, aquatic animal in it. If they don’t guess this correctly you will NEVER invite them back, uneducated Philistines that they are!
That’s really all there is here. There is no further game built around the guessing system at all, not even a board to move around on like in Pictionary. The guessing system IS the game. Even worse, apart from stacking up cubes to double/triple emphasize certain illustrations and vigorously pointing and sweating and turning bright red as your team’s guesses get closer and closer to being correct, there really isn’t very much ground to get creative with your clues either. Thus, the game gets very repetitive very fast. Players inevitably end up communicating the same ideas the same way because it worked for a previous player, which unfortunately is a flaw inextricable from Concept‘s core design.
That being said, the game is perfectly functional: the illustrations are brightly colored and easy to discern, there are handy reference materials for tips on using the game’s various illustrations, and the overall production quality is high. There is also an undeniable thrill in successfully communicating an idea or phrase in the beleaguering context of a purposefully abstruse modality. But Concept has no vision for itself beyond that of a rote guessing game, making it impossible to recommend. This is made especially clear when considering the other, far superior guessing games out there like Codenames or Monikers that actually have slickly designed parent systems wrapping the simplistic pleasures of the guessing itself. So while Concept can make for an enjoyable couple of rounds as each player gives being the clue-giver a try and wrestles with the communication limitations imposed on them by the game, beyond that lies naught. And no, “the pleasure of guessing and being guessed” is not enough.
Concept gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.