GUESS WHO? SEARCHING THE TRUE IDENTITY SINCE 1979

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Guess Who?, one of the most popular party games.

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.

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.

More information: Gamesver

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.  computer game based on the series was released in 1999 by Hasbro Interactive.

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.

More information: ESL Kids Games

Games shouldn't only be fun.
They should teach or spark an interest in other things.

Hideo Kojima