Guess Who?
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- For other things sharing this name, see Guess Who.
Guess Who? is a two-player guessing game created by Ora and Theo Coster, also known as Theora Design, first manufactured by Milton Bradley in 1979 in Great Britain. It was brought to the United States in 1982.
Each player is given an identical board containing cartoon images of 24 people identified by their first names. The game begins with each player selecting a card of their choice from a separate pile of cards containing the same 24 images. The object of the game is to be the first to determine which card one's opponent has selected. This is done by asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates, such as "Does this person wear glasses?" When one's opponent provides the answer, one eliminates those that do not fit the criterion by 'flipping down' the cards on one's board.
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[edit] Tactics
Although most questions that are answered with a "NO" response will result in the elimination of five potential choices ("Does your person have red hair?" "Does your person have black hair" "Is your person wearing a red shirt?"), less-obvious questions can eliminate more than five. For example, "Does your person's name begin with a vowel?" can result in more. "Does your person have facial hair?" can eliminate 10 choices.
[edit] Editions
Early versions included fewer women than men; the 1987 edition featured only 5 women compared to 19 men.[1] In the mid-1990s, the faces were changed and made the sexes more even. In the version released 2000s, there are black faces for the first time.
Special editions which have different faces have been released, including Star Wars[2], Marvel Comics[3] and Disney[4]. There are smaller, "travel" editions which have only 20 different faces.
[edit] Advertising
In the United States, advertisements for the board game often showed the characters on the cards coming to life, and making witty comments to each other. This caused later editions of such ads to carry the spoken disclaimer line "game cards do not actually talk."
