Guess Who?

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

Guess Who?

Designers	Theo Coster Ora Coster Theora Design
Illustrators	Theora Design
Publishers	Milton Bradley
Publication	1979 (1979)
Years active	1979–present
Genres	Board game
Languages	English
Players	2
Playing time	20'
Age range	6+

Guess Who? (Hebrew: נחש מי?) is a two-player board game in which players each guess the identity of the other's chosen character. The game was developed by Israeli game inventors Ora and Theo Coster, the founders of Theora Design. It was first released in Dutch in 1979 under the name Wie is het? Milton Bradley then produced the game in the United Kingdom, and it was brought to the United States in 1982. It is now owned by Hasbro.

Gameplay

A group of children playing the game

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 some of the 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

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/Infogrames.

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, with which 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.

Use in education

Guess Who? has found use in an educational context, including the development of deductive reasoning skills. In addition, the game can be used for a wide range of speech and language development goals, including:

• Articulation
• Comprehension
• Question formation
• Describing salient features
• Vocabulary in foreign languages

Criticism of lack of diversity

Modern commentators have noted a bias toward white and male characters in Guess Who?. In 2012, a freelance journalist wrote to Hasbro on behalf of her six-year-old daughter, 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 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.

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, a black woman who was redrawn in a subsequent edition as white. More recently, Hasbro has redesigned the board to feature a more racially diverse set of people.

Television adaptation

On April 19, 2021, Deadline Hollywood announced that 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

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

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