Guess Who?

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For other things sharing this name, see Guess Who.

Guess Who? is a two-player guessing game first manufactured by Milton Bradley in the 1980s.

Each player is given an identical board containing cartoon images of 24 people identified by their first name. The game begins with each player selecting a card at random 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 your opponent selected. This is done by asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates, such as "Does this person wear glasses?" When your opponent provides the answer, you eliminate those who don't fit the criteria by 'flipping down' the cards on your board.

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?" "Is your person a woman?"), less-obvious questions can eliminate more than five. For example, "Does your person's name begin with a vowel?" can result in more.

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," a phrase which has proceeded to become something of a pop culture meme.

Although generally treated as a simple children's guessing game, playing can involve relatively complicated statistical scenarios. For example, the situation is often encountered wherein Player A (whose turn it is) has four possibilities left and Player B has only two possibilities left. Thus Player B will definitely guess correctly on the next turn. Player A is therefore confronted with the possibility of choosing a question which will eliminate either two choices for sure or a question which will possibly eliminate three choices (and thus allow for a certain guess) or only one choice (thus forcing a guess the next turn with only a 1 in 3 chance of hitting it for a rebuttal). In this situation many players will choose the seemingly safe choice of eliminating two choices for sure, thus assuring a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly for a rebuttal on the next turn. However, statistically attempting to eliminate three choices is better. If the player tries to eliminate three choices, there is a 25% chance of winning outright, 25% chance of tying that turn (with Player B correctly guessing for a rebuttal), 16.67% chance of tying the next turn (with a correct rebuttal guess from Player A) and 33.33% chance of losing. This is clearly better than the other option of a 50% chance of tying and 50% chance of losing.

[edit] Other styles of play

Many similarly strategically interesting scenarios arise during gameplay between experienced players.

A more advanced version of the game can be played, where each player chooses two cards at the beginning of the game, and the opponent has to get both. It often requires players to remember answers to previous questions. For example, if a player were to ask "Do any of your people have black hair?" and is answered with a "yes" and then asks "Do any of your people have blonde hair?" and is also answered with a "yes", then the player can eliminate all cards that do not have black- or blonde-haired people, assuming they remembered the previous question.

Another style of play between very experienced players is when players choose a character, then make up a clue or backstory about them based on their personality, which is based off their appearance. For example, Max is a stereotypical Italian guy, and Robert is your everyday middle-aged depressed man. Some players can even get to the point where they do not need the boards anymore, they simply remember everyones personality traits.

[edit] External links

• Hasbro's Guess Who? product page
• Guess Who? at BoardGameGeek