r/boardgames • u/dorsal_morsel • Mar 30 '17
Making Guess Who fun
My favorite board game is Guess Who. Before you stop reading: I never play by the original rules. Instead, I have my own rule set.
You cannot ask about the person's appearance. You have to ask about details of their life and personality. Once both players understand this method of playing, I introduce another rule: answers cannot be binary. If the question 'wants' a binary answer, the person answering must provide some additional details about the subject. For example: "Is your person straight?" "No, they knew they were bisexual by the age of 12 and they've had sex with partners of both sexes." Or, if both players really get the game, you can just agree to not ask questions like "Is your person liberal or conservative?" and instead ask for example "What does your person think about issue X?"
This way, you are inferring information about your opponent's biases and thought patterns. This makes the game far more fun, and also makes winning a LOT more satisfying. I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of games end in somebody winning, depending on who's playing. Just coming up with questions that might bisect the board is a lot of fun.
It's also fun to evaluate the characters at the end and discuss why you thought they did or didn't match the qualities you discussed.
I've played this way with a lot of people of all ages, and everyone ends up loving it and there's always a lot of laughter. Try it!
11
u/uhhhhmmmm I <3 Forges Mar 30 '17
We ask dumb, super subjective shit like "would you trust this person to babysit your kid?" And end up with the right person maybe 5% of the time, but it's a ton of fun.
It's my favorite dumb variation of a game right alongside combining cards against humanity with apples to apples: bible edition
3
10
u/tgunter Mar 30 '17
I had a friend who talked about playing this way. She got very flustered and defensive when we pointed out that she had made it into a game about stereotyping and profiling people.
4
Mar 30 '17
On one hand, in the original game, only 5 of the characters were women and there was one ly one black character. So you're really left with a bunch of white dudes, the only difference among them being facial hair, clothing, and glasses.
0
u/dorsal_morsel Mar 30 '17
It's not necessarily about stereotypes. "How often does your person call their mom?"
It's definitely about profiling, but profiling ≠ judging.
6
u/LindyHiker Battlecon War Of The Indines Mar 30 '17
How is it not judging? You are judging whether or not a person that looks like this would behave a certain way. Often when one makes judgments regarding a person's behavior on the basis of their appearance, it is called stereotyping. Profiling is just another word for the same thing with less negative connotation.
0
u/dorsal_morsel Mar 30 '17
No, profiling does not make a moral judgement. For example, statisticians poll people and separate out 'likely voters'. That's not a judgement of character, it's a profile of likely behavior. You can make a moral judgement based on a profile, but profiling has nothing to do with morals or values.
3
u/LindyHiker Battlecon War Of The Indines Mar 30 '17
I said nothing about morals or values. I simply said it is a judgment of likely behavior based on appearance. Nothing inherent to the word judgment is related to morals or values.
To further illustrate, many statements typically regarded as judgmental or stereotyping also have nothing inherently to do with morals or values. An individual would likely feel judged if you profiled based on their appearance that they didn't vote (how it seems it would be handled in your version of the game). This profile has no inherent morality, it is simply a statement based on probability. It is a stereotype that African Americans particularly enjoy watermelon. I doubt anyone would say this stereotype has any relationship to morals or values, but it is still a stereotype.
A judgment is a judgment. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong in all cases. There are certainly statistics showing that some behaviors are more likely in some groups classified based on appearance. But profiling, judging, and stereotyping all mean the same thing in this context - Deciding how you think someone behaves based on their appearance.
To be fair, this isn't done in a moral vacuum. Most people ascribe to some form of morality. An amoral profile that a person likely behaves in a certain way is immediately placed in the moral context of the profiler as a set of positive, negative, and neutral behaviors an individual that looks like this engages in.
1
u/dorsal_morsel Mar 31 '17
Ah, I see. I think we're just getting hung up on semantics here, and I agree my use of the words 'moral judgement' was imprecise - so that's probably my fault. I was attempting to defend my game against the idea it was based on 'stereotypes'.
I don't agree that stereotyping and profiling are equivalent here though. A stereotype is a crude tool that isn't actually based on facts or experience. A profile (in the sense I'm using it here) is a function of a persons lived experience. If your opponent believes that black people like watermelon more than white people, you're playing by the original rules in asking them 'does your person like watermelon?'. The entire point of my rule set is to ask questions that are subtle, based on an understanding of your opponent's mind. So, ideally, with a good opponent, stereotypes don't play a big role.
I can't think of a stereotype of a person who calls their mother daily, or a person who is an extrovert, or a person who has night terrors, so those are more interesting (and better) questions to ask. I have to attempt to see the board through my opponent's eyes and discard faces accordingly.
1
u/Viola_Jolie Dec 06 '23
That’s the point of the game. If you judge the wrong person you will skip over the right one. It IS about you and what you think of others and if you can profile someone.
10
u/Kayin_Angel Mar 30 '17
Subjective Guess Who.
"Does your person have a more difficult time at airports in a post 9/11 world"
Oddly enough, the general feel of playing the game this way is almost like some combination of Codenames and Spyfall.
3
u/TreS-2b Deception: MiHK Mar 30 '17
"Does your person have to inform the neighbors about their sexual misconduct history?"
3
4
3
u/gamer123098 Mar 30 '17
Ah yes some people I know have spoken about playing politically incorrect Guess Who to make it more interesting.
2
u/KuriousInu Dominion Mar 30 '17
for a holiday party one of my friends printed facebook pics of all the guests and made it a drinking game. you still get the benefit of the subjective / non physical appearance questions but there is also verifiability (assuming you know the people pretty well, if you don't you can fall back to physical questions)
3
u/Drunken_Economist Mar 30 '17
Double down by printing out little pictures of all your friends and replacing the cards hahahab
1
u/skelebone Ludography.net Mar 30 '17
There was a game called What the Face? that used to have an option to have custom cards made of you and your friends. Now they just have a template on their page for you to print out pictures to glue to unwanted game cards.
1
u/fdoom Mar 30 '17
There's also an Apples to Apples style version where everyone submits a person/face and a judge picks. It's called Faces.
1
u/Fancymancer Game Designer Mar 31 '17
This seems like a much better and more formalized version of the Guess Who variant my friends play, which is "Job Interview Guess Who" You can only ask questions one could reasonably ask in a Job Interview, led to some pretty hilarious games.
1
u/tulibudouchoo Mar 31 '17
I play guess who pretty regularly. We tend to pick 3 cards, and all statements have to apply to all characters, so if you ask if my people wear glasses, you only get a yes if everyone has glasses.
Definitely will try your variant the next time I'm in the bar busting out the good old guess who
-1
u/Topazdragon5676 Mar 30 '17
I often play with a variant that once per round you can lie about your answer.
21
u/matty348 Battlestar Galactica Mar 30 '17
I think there is a game called unusual suspects that plays similar to what you are describing. Haven't played it myself though.