British Concentration Home Game

[alfonzos]

Usually the foreign-made home game is equal or superior to its American counterpart. When the home game of the British Concentration game from the fifties bacame available on eBay I had to have it.

Now that I have it I feel sorry for the British fans of the show! There are no rebus puzzles! The gameboard has thirty numbered slides. There is a scroll inside the cardboard gameboard but the scroll contains the prizes. When a match is made the player puts the matching prize card on his prize rack. The are two "Wild Cards" but only two "Forfeits," two "Takes" and two sets of gag gifts.

The game is over when the last match is made. The player with the more valuable set of prizes is the winner.

The game is well-made for a cardboard and cellophane production. The game's color scheme is ugly.

[The Ol' Guy]

I'll join you in the "beware" of the 50s UK game. I also thought it had puzzles. The seller was not very descriptive - but the photo should have been warning enough. The "slides" are cardboard squares like the 50s Transogram Tic Tac Dough X and O tiles that are placed over cellophane windows that reveal the prizes. I wondered how something obviously printed on a sheet could be moved aside to reveal the rebus. They don't. Later versions closer to the current decade follow the MB/ Pressman format - but watch out for the early Chad Valley ones. Admittedly, that one makes me a bit wary of pursuring the matching Chad Valley version of their B&E game of the same era, Criss Cross Quiz, which was their name for Tic Tac Dough. If someone else here has that one, is it better than the Concentration home game? Don't let that one get you down, alfonzos. There really are some decent ones over there.

[rugrats1]

The British game would be OK for a BONUS round (especially when complemented with the American original), but when the UK game is merely straight Concentration without a rebus to guess, where's the sport in that?

[The Ol' Guy]

From the occasional EBay visits, it appears many of the English tv-based board games (quiz games, comedies and dramas) of the 50s were very cheaply made. Many had the game boards printed on the internal box support platforms, and they were very miserly with parts - tiny plastic markers and dice, small batches of play money, not many questions, cardboard game cards. The ones I grabbed to double check - Chad Valley Concentration, Bell's Take Your Pick and Double Your Money, and Merit's Ask Me Another all pretty much follow the chintzy road. Others I've seen - Bell's Spot The Tune has a small record and platform scoreboards, and even the Bell's Dotto has only 24 puzzles, 15 question categories and only 24 questions per category - so the fact that Chad Valley put so little effort into Concentration is not a surprise. But it also makes me wonder if they were on to something I've long suspected - perhaps there is more to their plan than just cheapness. I look at my game collection, and - with only a couple of exceptions, so many of them are ones I still have lots of virgin territory in - in other words, ---I'll pull a figure out of the air --- let's pretend an MB Family Feud has 75 complete games in each edition. Have I played it more than 10 times? Probably not. Most of us are above-average tv game show board game players. Perhaps the Brits knew that most people would rather watch the quizzes than play them, so they put in just enough material to play it several times before the game lost it's fascination and it wound up being consigned to the bottom of the closet or the attic. And most families that get US home games probably do the same. If it's all the same, if it would save $5 or so, I could get by on 25% less question material. Any thoughts? -
Oh, and let me clarify a point - I'm not saying most of our games have to be made any cheaper prop-wise - it's just that I can see us enjoying a Feud game with 45 complete games as much as we would 75 games. Heck, when sales merit it, we always get new editions if we're going to play them that much.

[Jimmy Owen]

A cheaply made board game would wear out faster and would have to be purchased again if the family used it a lot.