Guess Who? Board Game
by Hasbro
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Toys and Games Reviews of Guess Who? Board Game
Customer Review: You Want to Play Again?
Summary: 4 Stars
My youngest daughter has been in love with this game since she was about four or five years old. That's a bit young according to the manufacturer but she's always been an analytical type and figured out how to play early. When she was introduced to this game, she excelled to the point that few children wanted to play with her. She would play GUESS WHO numerous times a day until she ran out of opponents.
The game is a simple premise. The contest is for two people and each has a game board with twenty-four faces on them. The faces are in plastic frames that can face you when the person is still in the running or can be tilted over so they are face down when eliminated. The first time you play this game, you will need to set up each board. The faces have to be placed in the frames and the frame hinges clicked into the board. It takes about ten minutes to do this and from then on the game is ready to play.
Each player chooses their "person" of mystery by drawing a card and placing it in the top slot on their board. Their opponent has to figure out who they chose by eliminating the field of twenty-four. The twenty-four possibilities each have different characteristics and the trick is to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Deductive reasoning is the key to this by asking questions that reduces the number of possibilities. The first question out of my daughter is always, "Is your person a female?" The answer to that question always gets rid of many faces. Other questions might be the color of the person's eyes, facial hair, balding, clothing, etc. Since only one question can be asked at a time, getting rid of the most people with that one question is the trick. The first one to figure out their opponent's person is the winner.
GUESS WHO is such a simple game and is actually educational. Deductive reasoning is a primary tool that is used throughout life and if a young child can master it, they are going to do well. Another positive to this game is that after the initial set up, it is always ready to play - even young children can grab the boards and quickly begin. The downside is that GUESS WHO does not hold adults' interest like it does for children. It seemed as if my daughter could play this forever whereas I only wanted to play one or two games.
The game consists of two 2 plastic game board trays, 24 mystery cards, 48 face cards and face frames, 2 score keepers, 8 rubber feet, and instructions. It comes with a warning that there are small parts that pose a choking hazard for small children, but that is only before the initial set up. This game is recommended for children six to nine years old.
GUESS WHO is a great game that helps children learn to deduce. They seem to have fun flipping down those face frames in their pursuit of finding their opponents mystery person. And with my daughter, the more frames she got to flip at one time, the more she giggled. Ok, so it drove me nuts when she wanted to play several games every day but it was actually quite painless for me. Too bad they didn't come out with the new Disney version sooner that would have been a nice change.
Customer Review: Guess who 'fixed' something that wasn't broken?
Summary: 2 Stars
An old favorite of mine as a child, I bought this for my 4 yr-old a few months ago hoping he would enjoy it as much as my sister and I had. Right from the beginning, it wasn't exactly as I remembered.
The original style of the game came with the boards already put together but the ones in this set you have to put together yourself. All the windows have to be separated from plastic and then the cards have to be inserted, which takes some time. That alone wouldn't be a problem, except the cards are flimsy and kept popping out of the tiles as I was trying to put them in because the tiles are curved and you have to bend the card through and under little plastic bars otherwise they fall out all the time. The original one had flat tiles, which would be a great improvement to make to this game.
The plastic is also VERY cheap; some of the tiny pegs that connect the tiles to the boards bent or broke during the very first game, meaning the tiles no longer go all the way down without popping out or won't stay up at all. We kept having to stop after nearly every turn to sort the tiles and boards out which was a real shame: what 4-yr old is going to wait around while Mummy sorts the tiles out for the tenth time? Not mine! My son found it very frustrating too; he would try to push the tiles up or down after they came loose but they kept falling out of the board and he couldn't snap them back in without knocking over an handful of the other tiles! We had to keep starting the game over. Even I had the same problem, so helping him didn't actually help much!
The pictures are good, however. The faces have been updated and are a lot of fun. Some of the expressions are subtle; older children would probably have a much easier time of determining whether a face has a smile or a grimace! Once my son got used to the faces, however, he did fine. He still occasionally wants to play the game but he does get fed up pretty quickly and back in the cupboard it goes.
**TIP: If you are considering purchasing this for a younger child, I would recommend putting the tiles in the same locations on both boards. Then you can 'help' them if they accidentally turn down the wrong people... you'll have your own board to refer to :-)
Maybe we got a defective set? The low ratings I've given this particular version are obviously based on our limited experience with this particular set. If it had been the original I used to have, it would get five stars all round as a game in general. My sister and I would play for hours! I am now hunting on eBay for an original if for no other reason than to compare.
Overall, I just don't know why the manufacturer felt the need to 'modernize' something that was fine as it was. Don't fix it if it 'aint broken, right?
I hope this review helps you with your purchase ... maybe you'll have better luck than we did :-)
Customer Review: Terrible Construction Ruins (A Mediocre) Game
Summary: 2 Stars
I do not recommend this game and cannot understand the 4.5 star average rating. Yes, my kids enjoy it. However, it is so poorly put together that its just really, really annoying to play. The plastic pieces routinely fall over, or come off entirely. The person pictures come out quite easily unless you tape them in place, and if you tape them they may not flip properly. It takes maybe 30-60 seconds of "set up" time to play a 2-4 minute game. While this isnt the end of the world, I personally find it quite annoying.
Here is how the game works: there are around 30 or 40 faces in the game. Each player randomly picks one card from the 40. Each player has a rack which includes cards for all the faces which are turned away from the opposing player so that only you can see the faces in your rack. Each trait (for example gender) is split so that there is a minority (i.e. there are only 6ish female faces, and 6ish black faces, etc...) and a majority (the remaining faces -- i.e. 20+ are male, 20+ are white, etc...). There are around 10 or so traits, all with this majority/minority trend -- gender, race, glasses, hats, bald, facial hair, etc... Every person seems to have at least one or more minority traits (i.e. its a man, but he is bald, or wearing a hat.) You ask a question, ie "is it a girl" and, depending on the answer, flip over the boys/girls on your rack to eliminate them, and by process of elimination, and by asking more questions eg "is the person bald" work down till there is only one person on your rack, which must be the person the opposing player picked. Whoever gets down to one left on their rack first (i.e. figures out who the other player picked first) wins. Getting lucky and picking the right minority trait to ask about is more useful than good logic.
I'm not overly PC or anything, but I just cant warm to a game the whole purpose of which is asking questions designed to exclude people with minority traits, so you can, by process of elimination, figure out who is left.
Moreover, the concept is so simple that I dont think the game is very educational. The kids (even the very young) quickly learn the basic concept. Once they learn it, there isnt any real learning left to do. (Yes, its true an adult can use more advanced logic to pick the "best" questions, but good luck explaining that to a young kid. Indeed, I bet there are plenty of adults that would not understand the logic behind selecting an optimal question.)
Skip it.
Customer Review: ***TAKING GUESS WHO FURTHER***
Summary: 5 Stars
Friends, after 4 years of endless fun, I simply have to share this. Guess Who has transformed my life, and maybe what follows will do the same for you.
Below are the rules of HARDCORE CHAMPIONSHIP GW:
1. Each player draws THREE cards. A bit fiddly to slot in, I know, but if you're the kind of mind that appreciates Guess Who, I know you can do it. A bit of overlap never hurt anyone.
2. Now concentrate. Legal questions are of TWO sorts: Either 'Do ANY of yours have...?' or 'Do MOST of yours have...?'. The ANY question doesn't need explaining; the MOST one does and is crucial - MOST simply means more than 1, i.e. 2 or 3 (all)
So if you get asked 'Do MOST of yours have dark hair?' and say you have two black and one brown, your answer would have to be 'Yes'. Your opponent now knows that you have AT LEAST two darkies, and PERHAPS a third. If you only had one darky and therefore answered `No', your opponent would be left with the unsavoury conclusion that you MIGHT have one, but definitely not any more. Got it?
NB: There is no 'Do ALL of yours have...?' question.
3. The most beautiful rule of all and the third, CRITICAL enhancement of Championship GW is this: each player can choose to decline ONE - and only one - question per game. Rest assured, a poker-faced 'I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I'm not going to answer that' adds more than just smug satisfaction. It opens up a whole new bluffing dimension, which, if executed and timed successfully, will see you careering ahead while your opponent is left to restructure his game around an inferior and ultimately fatal line of enquiry. Not only is he or she left without an answer, he or she cannot ask the same question the following go.
4. As an offshoot of the above, you HAVE to answer the first question. Use yours wisely - it's the only one you're guaranteed an answer to.
5. While you can make individual guesses, e.g. 'Are any of yours Stephen?', a triple-character guess is FINAL. Get it right and you win, get it wrong and you lose the game. No messing about here folks, you need to be sure before you guess, or at least only be guessing because you think you're about to be had anyway so you might as well take the plunge.
That's it. You've now left the old, rather limited standard game for a beautiful world of logical deduction, ruthless cunning and maximum enjoyment.
Championship GW is OUT OF CONTROL - TRY IT and spread the word!
Customer Review: My Niece Loves It
Summary: 5 Stars
This game is rated for ages 6+. However, my 5-year old niece is capable of playing it. That said, she's only playing the 1-card variation of the game. (There is also a 2-card variation.) She's fascinated by this game, probably because it's the first deductive-logic game she has been exposed to. Every time I visit, she asks me to play it with her.
An important characteristic of this game is that an adult and a child can play equally well together, without the adult having an overly unfair advantage over the child. That's because the game allows for various degrees of strategy, but enough degree of luck to keep things interesting. My niece actually wins quite often when I play with her.
Onto the game itself. The rules are pretty simple, the main one being that each player is allowed to ask yes/no questions about the card they are trying to guess. She picked up the basic premise of the game surprisingly quickly just by following my lead a few times (i.e. asking about various facial traits such as the presence of hair color, glasses, baldness, hats, earrings, etc).
After a few days, her game play has begun to develop beyond basic deduction logic, incorporating some "advanced" strategy (i.e. which traits are most advantageous to ask about first, employing "OR" questions, rudimentary understanding of probabilities when forced to guess amongst 2 or 3 cards, etc). Even to an adult, some of these stategies are not initially obvious. And that's one of the reasons why I like this game so much. It allows a child to utilize their logical thinking to develop new strategies that improve game play, while still infusing enough randomness to keep things interesting.
Finally, another reason for liking "Guess Who" is that it does not necessarily require a child know how to read. Guess Who has cards with different facial characteristics on them, and a young child does not need to know how to read to play this game. A child can simply point out the card associated with his/her guess. That said, my niece is very good at associating names to faces, so she has already memorized the names of all 24 faces, even though she can't yet read all the names on the cards themselves.