Guess Who?

This article is about the game. For other uses, see Guess Who.

Two people playing Guess Who?

Guess Who? is a two-player board game where players each guess the identity of the other's chosen character. The game was developed by Israeli game inventors Ora and Theo Coster, also known as Theora Design, and first manufactured by Milton Bradley in 1979. It is now owned by Hasbro. The game was first brought to the UK by Jack Barr Sr. in 1982. The classic edition is currently being produced by Winning Moves Games USA.

Gameplay

Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon images of 24 people and their first names with all the images standing up. Each player selects a card of their choice from a separate pile of cards containing the same 24 images. The objective of the game is to be the first to determine which card one's opponent has selected. Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates, such as:

• "Does your person wear a hat?"
• "Does your person wear glasses?"
• "Is your person a man?"

The player will then eliminate candidates (based on the opponent's response) by flipping those images down until only one is left. Well-crafted questions allow players to eliminate one or more possible cards.

Editions

A giant-sized game of Guess Who? at the Spiel festival, 2008

Special editions which have different faces have been released, including Star Wars, Marvel Comics and Disney. There are smaller, "travel" editions that have only 20 different faces. In 2008 and 2010, extra and mix and match games were released. A computer game based on the series was released in 1999 by Hasbro Interactive.

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" to meet Federal Trade Commission advertising guidelines requiring full disclosure of toy features unable to be replicated with the actual product.

Strategy

Popular belief is that a binary search is the most efficient approach to the game, where each question halves the number of possible identities. This can be applied by asking complex questions - such as "Does your character have red hair, or glasses, or a big nose?" - where a yes or a no eliminates exactly half of the remaining characters. Such a strategy takes only four questions to reduce the field to three people, giving the fifth question a 50/50 chance of identifying the opponent's character.

The game was strongly solved by Mihai Nica in 2016. Nica's research found that while a player was ahead their optimal strategy was a binary search, and when behind they should instead make "bold plays" that had a chance of narrowing things down significantly, in order to pull ahead of the other player. Using this method, the first player has a 63% chance of winning under optimal play by both sides.

Reception

The Blaze noted that the major perk of playing the game is "watching your opponent [watch you] knock down several of the flipped up tiles with faces on them, putting you well on your way to guessing his or her main character".

Criticism of lack of diversity

Modern commentators have noted a bias toward white and male characters in Guess Who. In 2012, a six-year-old girl wrote to Hasbro asking why there were only five female characters to choose from, against nineteen male. Hasbro's response noted that each characteristic in the game – such as wearing glasses, or having red hair – was based on a numerical equation, and deliberately appeared exactly five times. The company wrote that the game was intended to "draw attention away from using gender or ethnicity as the focal point, and to concentrate on those things that we all have in common, rather than focus on our differences".

In response to Hasbro's statement, the child's mother said that she thought identifying physical differences was "the whole point" of the game, and asked "Why is female gender regarded as a 'characteristic', while male gender is not?" The New Statesman criticized the "tone-deafness" of Hasbro's remarks. Blogger Avital Norman Nathman suggested that the decision to include five women in the game may not have been a conscious choice, and that this was is a problem in itself.

Some editions of the game since the early 2000s have included more women.

The original version of Guess Who featured only one non-white character – Anne, who was redrawn in a subsequent edition as a white woman. More recently, Hasbro has redesigned the board to feature a more racially diverse set of people.

Television adaptation

A planned unscripted television adaptation of the board game was in early development at NBC and will be produced by Endemol Shine North America and Entertainment One (Hasbro's subsidiary).

People's names

Name	Also known as	Introduced	Retired	Notes
Al	Alfred, Stephen	1980	—
Amy	—	2018	—
Anita	—	1980	2018
Anne	—	1980	2018	Absent from 1998–2002
Ben	—	2018	—
Bernard	—	1980	2018
Betty	—	1999	2001
Bill	Phillipe	1980	2018
Carmen	—	2002	—
Charles	Hans	1980	2018
Claire	Sarah	1980	2018
Daniel	—	2018	—
David	Luke, Lucas	1980	—
Emma	—	2018	—
Eric	—	1980	—
Farah	—	2018	—
Frank	—	1980	1998
Gabe	—	2018	—
George	Joe	1980	2001
Herman	—	1980	2018
Holly	Kaitlin	1999	2018
Joe	—	1980	—	Absent from 1998–2002
Jordan	—	2018	—
Katie	—	2018	—
Laura	—	2018	—
Leo	—	2018	—
Lily	—	2018	—
Liz	—	2018	—
Maria	—	1980	2018
Max	Theo	1980	2018
Mia	—	2018	—
Mike	—	2018	—
Nick	—	2018	—
Olivia	—	2018	—
Paul	—	1980	2018
Peter	—	1980	2018	Absent from 1998–2002
Philip	Max, Mario	1980	2018
Rachel	—	2018	—
Richard	Roger	1980	2018
Robert	—	1980	1999
Sally	Sophie	1999	2018
Sam	Charles	1980	—
Sofia	—	2018	—
Susan	—	1980	1998
Tom	Albert, Daniel	1980	2018
Victor	—	1999	2018

External links

• Guess Who? at BoardGameGeek
• Theora Design – the designers.
• Ahmad, Muneeb Imtiaz; Shahid, Suleman; Maganheim, Johannes (July 9–11, 2014). Miesenberger, Klaus; Fels, Deborah; Archambault, Dominique; Peňáz, Petr; Zagler, Wolfgang (eds.). A Game-Based Intervention for Improving the Communication Skills of Autistic Children in Pakistan. International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. I. Paris: Springer International. pp. 513–516. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08596-8. ISBN 978-3-319-08596-8.{{cite conference}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) CS1 maint: date format (link)