Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
A children’s adaptation of a beloved board game has a tricky path to walk, needing to be both simple enough for the kids whilst retaining the feel of the original game. Do you like Carcassonne? Put My First Carcassonne in front of your tots and they’ll be tile-laying like a pro in no time. Are you an Everdell fan? Give your nippers some My Lil’ Everdell and they’ll be climbing the evertree for evermore.
We adults love games because they entertain, engage, challenge us and more. Kid’s games though? Frequently they’re too simple for grown-ups, making the experience a dull slog to push through for the sake of the kids rather than something to enjoy in its own right. Successful children’s adaptations manage to streamline the rules to make the experience understandable for the under 8s without losing the adults.
Which brings us to Concept Kids: Animals. Based on 2013’s Concept, it’s just about the only kids’ version of a game where the rules haven’t been simplified from the original. That’s because you could tip the components of Concept onto a table in front of a group of strangers and they’d figure out how to play for themselves (see K. David Ladage’s Concept review for more information).
Concept Kids: Animals pulls the same trick. Within moments of putting the board and bits on the table, my children were providing clues like they’d been playing their whole lives. Few gaming experiences are as intuitive. Fewer still have had my kids not wanting to stop.
Give us a clue
Concept Kids: Animals is a deduction game where the adults are trying to guess a type of animal and the kids are providing clues as to the animal’s identity. The board is composed of zones that provide options for different animal attributes. There’s a colour zone, a habitat zone, a body shape/limb zone, diet zone, and so on.
The kids look at an animal card and then start to place square clue markers in the various zones of the board to describe the animal. For a tiger they might provide clues such as ‘orange’, ‘meat eater’, ‘jungle’, ‘four legs’ and ‘claws’. If you guess correctly then great, next card. Otherwise, you can keep guessing until you give up and then it’s on to the next card anyway. Work your way through 12 cards and at the end compare how many you got right against the feline scale provided in the rules. Being a stubborn family, we refuse to pass on any and therefore are always ‘legendary lions’.
For reference, we have a recently-turned 5 year old and a 7 year old and they were hooked for a good 25 minutes, which for the youngest is saying something. To keep her still for that long using anything that doesn’t have a screen is a work of wonder. The game states that it’s playable by children from 4 years old and up and based on our experiences that’s totally accurate.
The rules suggest alternate ways of playing depending on your child’s experience, with a harder deck of animal cards, role reversal and a variant akin to the original game with a single player providing clues for everyone else to guess. To be honest, the experience is loose enough that you can follow any of those variants or try something different yourself. Whilst all the provided variants are cooperative, you can also play it competitively like the original Concept by keeping score of who guesses the most animals.
Animals on board
I’m a former zoologist, my wife remains a zoologist; animals are a thing in our family so Concept Kids: Animals was always going to go down well with us. That doesn’t mean it gets a free pass (and there are some minor issues that I’ll touch on in a moment) but as a family experience it’s certainly a success. Watching the little ones actively thinking about what clues to provide, considering what they know about each animal, discussing ideas with each other, gleefully shouting ‘YES!’ when we guessed an animal correctly – that’s the stuff of parenting dreams, it’s joyous.
Plus, the kids were learning stuff. Not just facts about animals but ways to think about animals – how they live, what habitats are, activity patterns, the word ‘crepuscular’. Sure, some of that education came from us as parents, but much came from the game itself, prompting the kids to ask questions and be curious. And when they figured something out or gave a great clue they felt like they’d done something clever and gained confidence as a result. Again, parenting dreams.
So, is Concept Kids: Animals good for grown-ups as well as kids then?
Well…
It’s not something to be endured but comparing your score against a chart is as dull as it is in the hundreds of games that use the same process as their solo mode. We just keep going through the animal cards until the kids get tired and want to do something different (which still takes a decent amount of time). It becomes more of a communal activity than a cooperative game.
But game endings are more than seeing who won or whether the team is victorious. Endings define and resolve the playing experience. They change how we feel about the previous minutes or hours, they influence our own enjoyment and our desire to go back for another round. As in most narrative forms, a good ending can save a story, a bad ending can sink it. Concept Animals: Kids, based on the rules as written, regardless of the variant used, ends with a quiet anticlimax rather than an exciting conclusion. Before the kids get much older we’ll switch to the original’s competitive rules to give the experience a little more energy.
There’s also the fact that ‘colour’ is an overpowered clue.
The production of Concept Kids: Animals is gorgeous, just the right blend of engaging and elegance. But one of the main areas of the board is about animal colour and that’s a little super-powered for the animals included in the game. The clue ‘pink’ is likely to refer to ‘pig’ when using the easy animal cards, the clue ‘yellow’ is almost certainly ‘cheetah’ in the difficult animal cards. The game has a nice mix of animals but perhaps a few more brightly coloured animals would have helped to reduce the power of the colour clue.
There’s a ‘bestiary’ card with all the animals listed on it for younger kids who might struggle and combined with colours that almost breaks the experience. Sometimes a colour has been given as the first clue and that’s that. We’ve ended up trying to use colour as a secondary clue, something to turn to if the adults are struggling, but that feels like it limits the experience fractionally. As the adult guessing the animal, it’s best to steer clear of the bestiary card and go in blind to what might be in the decks of animal cards. Without knowing what animals are included, the game is interesting for adults as well as the kids, occasionally even a challenge.
These are minor grumbles and broadly don’t detract from the overall experience. For us Concept Kids: Animals has been a huge success, providing the kids with hours of energy, excitement and education. For a game that is playable by children as young as 4 (or even younger) and rewarding for the grown-ups, it’s a remarkable achievement and the few small shortcomings are easily forgivable.
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