08 Aug 2024: Concept

Hello, World. The game Concept scratches an itch for me. I like to think and learn about language. Concept invites you to do just that. It does that by, naturally, introducing limitations. The object of the game is to communicate a concept with a small vocabulary and simple grammar. It’s a lot of fun and I want to tell you about it.

The box includes a deck of cards, four reference sheets (not shown), a board with a grid of little images, a sheet of lightbulb chits (not shown), five color-coded tokens, and a bowl of color-coded cubes. The images on the board form a vocabulary that is defined on the reference sheets. As I said, you use this vocabulary to try to communicate a target concept. You do that with the tokens and cubes, the grammar.

The tokens indicate concepts and the cubes indicate modifiers. The green token is special, though; it indicates the main concept. This is the concept that most fundamentally describes your target. For instance, suppose our target is “soldering iron.” We could put the green token on the “tool” square. This shows that the target concept is a tool. That’s a bit vague though: What kind of tool? What does it do? So we use a green cube to give a modifier to our tool. We put a green cube on “electronic”. Then we have an “electronic tool” or a “tool used in electronics.” We are on our way, but it’s still a bit vague. We can do better.

The other tokens are for sub-concepts. They also have matching cubes. These are used to clarify the main concept with a related concept. Continuing on, we can put a sub-concept token on the square for “do - verb”. This is to indicate that we intend to describe what the tool does or something you do to the tool. Then you place matching cubes on “hot” and “metal”. With these hints together your teammates might put together “A tool for electronics that heats up metal.” Whether or not this leads to “soldering iron” is, as far as I can tell, entirely up in the air.

The whole time you are trying to convey your target concept, you are not allowed to speak except for saying “Yes.” You can’t even clarify that you meant “do - verb” and not “button.” As you quickly learn, the way you think about the target concept, or even the vocabulary, is not universal. And even when they are held in common, sometimes you just can’t connect the dots. This has been proven to me both frustrating and hilarious. I’ve had a lot of laughs just recalling specific exchanges like this one:

A: "It's some kind of hot yellow dirt!"
B: "Yellowcake uranium?"
(It was sand.)

In typical play, you have competing teams. This requires four or more players. Target concepts are drawn from a deck of cards. Team members take turns giving hints. Other players guess. Success accrues lightbulb chits. More lightbulbs means you win.

But it doesn’t need to be played that way. The game is perfectly playable cooperatively. This works with 2 or more players. All players take turns giving hints and guessing. You can distribute the lightbulbs however you want. (I give them out to players who guess correctly. I may later release a chart of point targets for cooperative play.)

The competitive angle is unnecessary. I think this speaks to the strength of the core game play. Because the fun of the game is in trying to communicate with equipment. Failure or success, you learn something about yourself and your friends. Something about how we encode the world.