Guess Who?

About

Guess Who? is a board game made originally by Milton Bradley and now Hasbro in which two players have a board of faces on cards as well as a single card with a face the other player attempts to guess via a series of yes-or-no questions. After each question, a player eliminates faces on their board until they're left with only one possible person. The game has been a popular board game for over thirty years and online has been used in many exploitables and parodies.

History

Ora and Theo Coster created Guess Who? and Milton Bradley manufactured the game in 1979.^[1] The game is for two players and each player has a board of 24 cards with cartoon faces standing up. Each player also has a card featuring the person the other player is trying to guess. Players then take turn asking yes-or-no questions such as "Is your person wearing a hat?" or "Does your person have brown eyes?", eliminating people on their board along the way until they are sure which card the other person has.

Hasbro has created different versions of the game themed around pop culture, such as Star Wars and Disney editions^[2][3] of the game.

Diversity Controversies

Guess Who? has been dogged with criticism of the racial and sexual variety of characters. For many years, the game featured only five female characters as opposed to nineteen male characters. In 2012, an exchange between Hasbro and a six year old girl wanting more female characters made headlines. The girl, through her mother, wrote she was "cross" about there only being five female characters and that pulling a female character put a player at a significant disadvantage as one of the first questions asked in Guess Who? is often about a character's gender. Hasbro responded by stating "Guess Who? is a guessing game based on a numerical equation. If you take a look at the characters in the game, you will notice that there are five of any given characteristics," meaning "female" itself was a characteristic. The response was mocked by Jezebel^[4] and Mary Sue.^[5] The game's cast used to be entirely white as well, but that has been changed to feature a more racially diverse group.^[6]

Online Presence

The game has been used in myriad parodies online. Several parodies have used Samuel L. Jackson saying the line "Does he look like a bitch?" in the film Pulp Fiction (examples shown below). These have dated back to as early as April 2nd, 2008.^[8]

The game has also been used in myriad pop culture parodies, using franchises such as Super Smash Brothers and Star Wars (shown below).

In February of 2019, an exploitable of based on Guess Who? became popular on Reddit. The template features a player asking a very specific yes-or-no question, resulting in turning down a photoshopped card. The exploitable generally uses a Things I Don't Like punchline. Some examples include a February 4th post by bepis-senpai on /r/memes making fun of Maroon 5 after Super Bowl LIII that gained over 5,600 points (shown below, left) and a Matt Mii meme posted February 5th by asisofo_5 on /r/dankmemes that gained over 18,000 points (shown below, right). The memes were covered by stayhipp.^[7]

Search Interest

External References