Focus – All about what’s not said

Some board games require a bit of mind reading, and so need someone that you are familiar with in order to play them. Focus feels like one of these types! It’s a two player sort of card game (though all of the cards are square) where you must lay out a bunch of different objects to create a grid. Then, you and another player get a card that tells you what card is your secret card.

In Focus you want your partner to pick up every single card but your secret card, and they want you to do the same. This is done not through talking, but instead through sort of hinting at what card. It’s actually kind of complex to describe!

The grid has a bunch of cards and one card is yours, you can sort of select cards within the same category to hint to the other player what card you do not want them to take. They will be doing the same, as one person grabs a card and then the next grabs a card, and this continues until one of you loses the game by grabbing the other’s secret card or only the secret cards are left.

Focus does feel like a game that requires some knowledge of how each of you thing and work. When I played with Dann, for example, he always started off by grabbing a card that had the same colour, primarily, as his secret card. This was a big giveaway once I had figured it out! I often tried to find cards that had a similar type as the card that I did have — if it was a toy I would start selecting other toys, for example, that were placed out. Sometimes you get lucky and there are tons of cards in the grid that can hint at it, but other times you aren’t so lucky as this grid is randomly placed.

Focus isn’t a particularly challenging game or a game where it feels like there is a big winner or a loser, and for that reason, it does feel like a fantastic two player game, as long as the two players do know how each other thinks that is. We actually played Focus at The Dice Box, as a date night game!

You can purchase Focus from Zatu Games.