First Impressions of Concept

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We tried out Concept last week and it was utterly hilarious! The game presents you with a board covered in icon like images that you use to illustrate… concepts! From “Bilbo Baggins” to “Rekindle the flame”, it plays like a picture based charades, without having to make anyone stand up and make a fool of themselves. One player will silently add tokens to the board (like the big green question mark in the picture above) while everyone else vomits out guesses for what they could be trying to communicate. Of course, inevitably this goes horribly wrong.

It’s obvious why. Say I place a cube on the black paint splat, and another on the eye symbol. Do I mean something as simple as “black eye”? Or am I actually illustrating “darkness”? Something that at first seems simple to illustrate turns into a mess as your friends run off down the wrong rabbit hole. Once an idea has seeded in their heads, its very hard to dislodge too, teaching us all some important lessons about how entrenched views are hard to change!

Discovering how bad you all are at communicating simple ideas is inherently hilarious. It’s the same joy and ridiculousness that made Mysterium so wonderful! And the drunker you are the better. By the time we got to the famous wildlife photographer, Wood Got Soiled, I was beyond helping, collapsed on the table laughing. Funnily enough, that wasn’t the right answer!

If you can forgive the pun, it’s a great concept for a game! I just hope it has the staying power to turn it into a classic.