Concept

Guest post by Jennie B.

At Christmas time I scour the board games and pick new ones to add to our families' ever growing game closet. Last year I added the game Concept, but it wasn't until this summer we opened the box to try it out. I am so glad we did, because it was such fun to play.

The basic premise of concept is to pick a word or phrase and then use icons, printed on the game board, to get the other players to guess the word. There are over 100 icons to choose from. Each icon is associated with a concept. For example the concept for the icon with a blue human figure is male, masculine, or husband. To help learn the concepts for each icon there is a cheat sheet for each player. 

At the start of each game the player who drew the card with the word or phrase has markers they place on all the icons that can help the other players guess the word or phrase. Hilarity ensues when the players guessing can not quite grasp the right concept. Points are awarded based on who first guessed correctly, and the game ends when a certain point value is reached.

This game says to play it with teams of two, but when we played we preferred having only one person drawing the card and placing the markers on the icons. We also decided not to keep score as it was just as enjoyable to try to guess the right word or phrase.

Since that summer we have pulled the game out several times. It can be played with up to 12 people and is a fairly quick game. I highly recommend this game if you want a quick party game. The only thing I would caution is it does take quite a bit of thinking to try to make sense of the concepts associated with the different icons. Although this caused quite a few laugh out loud moments during our game!