Concept Board Game How to Play & Review

How to play Concept, a Deduction and Party game.

Title: Concept

Year Published: 2013

Designer: Gaëtan Beaujannot, Alain Rivollet

Publisher: Repos Production

Players: 4-12

Game Time: ~40 mins

Set-up Time: ~1 min

Ages: 10+

Theme: –

Mechanic: Deduction

How to win: Score the most points.

Game Description

In Concept, your goal is to guess words through the association of icons.

Set-Up

Place the board, shuffle the deck and put it on its space on the board, choose a start player and they draw a card… That’s it…

Concept Game Play

So this is often called “Charades on a Board”, but instead of acting and flailing your arms, you’re placing cubes on icons on a board to point players in the right direction.

The card the start player has listed several choices of a ‘thing’ you’re trying to get the other players to guess.

That player starts by placing the ‘Main Concept’ pawn on the relevant space on the board… For example, if it’s a Book, put it on the book space…

You then use the cubes of the same colour to suggest sub-concepts that related to the main concept.

This is where you can get creative by using the cubes in interesting ways. Using multiple cubes to denote there is a lot of something, stack them up to show something is tall… It’s up to you!

While doing this, the other players are allowed to ask questions, but you can only say “Yes” to show players are on the right track. You shouldn’t give anything else away if possible…

You can pick up and put down cubes if you need to get over that they’re in a specific order, such as colours of a flag. (Red then White then Blue for example)

There are a few extra cubes and further sub concept pieces you can use to add more clues to the board.

Here you can use them to add further sub-concepts that are related to the clue but separate from other concepts to avoid confusion.

Example…

Let’s say Book, Man and Woman are in the main concept. A separate concept may be ‘War’, to show there is also a War in this book.

If Book, Man, Woman AND War are all under the same concept you may think the book is about a Man and Woman fighting…

Get it? Good!

Game End

There is scoring in this game but even the rule book says don’t bother 🙂

I usually play that you get 2 points if you’re guessing and you’re first to get it right and 1 point if you’re giving clues and a player was able to guess it in a 5-minute time limit.

We play until the point tokens run out.

You’re also supposed to play as a pair of 2 people giving clues, so you take two turns in a row… One with the player on your left, then one with the player on your right but I prefer to play it as a solo clue giver.

But, how you play is up to you, it’s a fun activity rather than a ‘board game’.

Concept Board Game Round-Up

So this is a very fun game… if you like that sort of thing.

It’s a MASSIVE challenge to think about how you get across your Concept as clearly as possible without going off track…

This means being route one most of the time, but thinking laterally other times.

I had a book, that’s also a film, that featured fighting, 2 men and a woman love triangle, death, Politics and a lack of food…

THAT was fun to put together as I thought about parts of ‘The Hunger Games‘ and how I could add them onto the board so people would understand.

Love it!

Concept Rating

A fun activity with a challenge I really enjoy facing

I give it 7/10