CONCENTRATION
(Visual Puzzle)
Players form two teams. In each round teams try to solve a picture rebus puzzle that is divided into pieces. Teams reveal pieces and earn a chance to guess the rebus by choosing cards in the style of the memory card game Concentration. Cards contain words, and if the chosen cards’ words match as members of a particular category then a rebus puzzle piece is revealed. Each round features 12 word cards and twelve matches, which means that each word is part of two matches: SHELL is a “brand of gasoline” but also a “pasta shape”; BOW TIE is a “pasta shape” but also an “item worn around the neck”; etc.
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The picture rebus part of the game is a taken directly from the NBC game show of the same name, but the word matching is based on a category overlap mechanism I’ve used in other puzzles and games, e.g. Triple Bonds in Crowd-Pleasing Puzzles. The game debuted at a LA miniconvention. Andrew Bradburn was one of the players and he volunteered to help write subsequent iterations and also present the game at NPL conventions. In LA, the word cards were letter-size and distributed among the teams so that a player looking for match would choose two people to hold up their cards. At con, teams were smaller and the word cards were index cards arranged on a table. An amusing situation occurred in the debut game which featured the category “types of jelly.” The card words were PETROLEUM (also “things that come from a well”) and KY (also “state postal abbreviations”). The match was discovered, but one of the older players halted the proceedings so that someone could explain to her what KY Jelly was.
life as a puzzle 