r/mildyinteresting • u/Heartt_Shaped_Potato • Dec 30 '25
playtime đ§¸đŞ This 80s Guess Who board after one question: "Is yours female?"
1.3k
u/FrontEcho3879 Dec 30 '25
163
u/BoulderCreature Dec 30 '25
What?!
101
u/peelyon85 Dec 30 '25
Say what again.
116
2
1
30
5
u/TheWeirdTalesPodcast Dec 30 '25
Just⌠just gonna leave this hereâŚ
5
4
u/daydreams83 Dec 30 '25
I laughed at this so hard, I went into one of those continuous laugh loops where everyone around you is concerned that you can hardly breathe. Thank you, I needed that!
2
2
1
2.6k
u/Gercke Dec 30 '25
I love playing this game with the rule that you can't ask any questions about physical appearance at all.
"Is your person a tech bro?"
"Would your person call the cops after seeing a black child walking in their neighborhood?"
"Is your person really into the healing properties of crystals?"
572
169
125
u/The_Amazing_Emu Dec 30 '25
Iâve heard it described as âsubjective Guess Whoâ
80
u/Fuzzy_Cake_5928 Dec 30 '25
Guess Who Vibes in our household. My 13 yr old & I had a hoot with it over the holidays. "What do you mean Sophie doesn't like her chilli spicy?" etc
18
u/According_Nobody74 Dec 31 '25
We have the SuperHero version. So trying to describe the âpowersâ and costumes can be interesting.
13
6
1
61
u/Moonmist81 Dec 30 '25
Itâs really the only way to play, considering the original game lasts like two minutes and has a skill ceiling a 4 year old could reach easily lol
Subjective Guess Who all the way
15
u/bakedcheetobreath Dec 30 '25
This is what we call it - so far we've only had one person win ever but it's still a great game.
2
2
u/Desperate_Bicycle_60 Dec 31 '25
In the mid 2000s me and friend had the board memorized to where we could literally play full games from memory, usually as a party trick lol
2
u/Magnaflorius Jan 01 '26
I like playing with two cards and you can only ask questions about "both" or "either" characters. It's hard. I need to keep a pen and paper to keep track.
38
u/The_Fattest_Man Dec 30 '25
"Are they taking antidepressants?"
"Have they abused their position within the church?"
"Have they smuggled drugs, internally?"
28
u/tychobrahesmoose Dec 30 '25
My sister made a custom board thatâs filled with people in our social group and this is how we play. It is INSANELY fun.
18
u/WAisforhaters Dec 31 '25
We did the same but speckled in a few random celebrities, a pigeon I met on vacation, and a marker drawing of a cat made of sushi that my wife and I came up with when we took some edibles. His name is sushi cat.
5
29
u/Low-Peak-9031 Dec 30 '25
We play this way as well lol
"Could your person be a psychiatrist?"
"Does your person teach liberal arts classes?"
9
8
6
4
4
3
u/UnionizedTrouble Dec 30 '25
My kid came up with âdoes your person have an E in their nameâ and holy hell, new strategies for selectively eliminating remaining one. Also âhave you eliminated your own person yet.â
7
Dec 30 '25
[deleted]
29
u/Twilightterritories Dec 30 '25
Yeah. That's the point of it. That's what makes it fun.
6
u/Oh_Blecch Dec 30 '25
I see it a bit more adjacent to a casting director. The idea that conclusions are made according how a person looks isn't new, or necessarily offensive. We communicate so much about ourselves by how we look!
Like, yes both Charles and David are into polyamory (for different reasons. David is mormon and Charles has the moustache). Frans for sure giggles when you tickle him. George doe not. Claire and Richard are avid gardeners. Yknow. Its fun.
→ More replies (10)7
u/Bananaland_Man Dec 30 '25
It also means you have to hope you and your opponent have the same subjective biases. This breaks the point of the game, and in the end, your question could've knocked down a correct answer. What a terrible way to play.
8
u/NolanSyKinsley Dec 30 '25
It also means you can tailor the questions and answers based on the preconceived notions you know your opponent has. Smosh plays this from time to time, once they did it with video game characters and Chanse asked "Would I smash this character?" and they hesitated before responding with a yes, so Chance giga braining it disqualified a character because he absolutely would smash "Without hesitation!" and he knew that Shayne and Courtney knew this so the hesitation alone was enough of a clue.
10
u/Twilightterritories Dec 30 '25
What exactly do you think the point of the game is?
→ More replies (1)8
u/Bananaland_Man Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
Using deductive reasoning to guess the correct person, and that's what makes it fun. Using subjective guesses can be fun, but also can be game breaking unless you and your opponent have the same subjective bias (very rare even with best friends). I've tried it many times and have often knocked down the one I'm supposed to guess because of this, which only makes the game frustrating in the end.
→ More replies (10)15
u/Twilightterritories Dec 30 '25
This is a child's game. Using deductive reasoning is fun when you're ages 4-9 any older than that, and this game becomes too easy. That's why subjective is better. The goal isnt to win when played this way. The goal becomes instead to make your opponents laugh and creatively describe the personality of cartoon characters. It becomes a party game. It's not chess. It's not that serious.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (1)2
u/TellThemISaidHi Dec 30 '25
Found the person who is really into the healing power of crystals, smuggles drugs internally, and makes Top Ramen in a Hello Kitty mug.
→ More replies (2)7
2
2
u/honourarycanadian Dec 30 '25
And it works!
7
u/Bananaland_Man Dec 30 '25
It really doesn't, raises the chances of knocking down a correct answer, making it impossible in many cases. More fun, sure, but it's a house rule that can be game breaking.
5
u/honourarycanadian Dec 30 '25
I think it works fine if youâre playing with friends and donât need to think too hard about it but I catch your point. Maybe not with strangers hahaha.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/trustcircleofjerks Dec 31 '25
I thought I invented this way and was the only one to know about it! Well me and a handful of people I played with as a teenager. It's a much better game, especially after you get it down to one person but then your guess is wrong and you have to go back through the game and forensically recreate that your buddy doesn't understand what a person who just bought a new red Mazda Miata looks like.
1
1
1
1
u/lita_atx Jan 01 '26
We did this in college, but would also sometimes play this way using real people in the coffee shop where we worked. đ
1
1
1
u/ribbitribbitmf Jan 02 '26
Now I kinda want to play this using these rules, with a drunk cards against humanity group
1
→ More replies (3)1
166
u/jngjng88 Dec 30 '25
There is always a character trait that if you guess right will eliminate most of the board.
78
u/VerbingNoun413 Dec 30 '25
It's a deliberate design so the game isn't a sequence of binary chops.
13
u/not-just-yeti Dec 30 '25
Though you still have an optimal, trivial strategy (ask a question that divides the answers into nearest to 50/50).
If they were concerned about making the game lasting longer (since halving each step would make the games too short or always-tied), then just add more people, and/or have a deck of 50 people where only 24 are included in any individual match.
3
u/Ok-Replacement8422 Dec 31 '25
Binary search isn't actually the optimal strategy in all situations.
In particular if you're behind you want to make riskier guesses in an attempt to catch up.
→ More replies (1)
545
u/_IsThisTheKrustyKrab Dec 30 '25
The game is designed so that any single trait will either eliminate most people or only a few people. It would mess up the game dynamic if there was one trait that eliminated exactly half of the options.
303
u/esushi Dec 30 '25
Though, the current version does exactly this (12 men, 12 women)
213
u/_IsThisTheKrustyKrab Dec 30 '25
Hasbro caved eventually due to getting flack about âlack of diversityâ but they recommend in the instruction manual now that you donât ask âmale or femaleâ in the first two rounds, which they didnât previously need that disclaimer.
→ More replies (4)108
u/Domdaisy Dec 30 '25
My sister and I made this rule on our own as kids because we had the old version (we were 90s kids though, so the change was not made until later than the title suggests).
We said you couldnât ask if your person was male or female at all, to make the game last longer.
36
u/proboscislounge Dec 30 '25
Guess who (but not like that)
15
u/Darth_Wader_420 Dec 30 '25
Yeah it sucked when you got a girl card. Welp this game is over hahaha.
1
1
u/Psychofischi Jan 01 '26
Yeah but they have different options.
I think ine was red glasses. Or something like that
→ More replies (2)1
u/Galwran Jan 02 '26
Our version also has ethnicities split evenly, so they get asked a lot :/
I wonder if there is a âcartoon robot/monsterâ version that has more complex traits, like 7 eyes, two of which are purple squares, etc.
8
u/Kurfaloid Dec 30 '25
I always thought this game was simply about teaching kids the efficiency of finding a question with the greatest information gain.
29
u/VerbingNoun413 Dec 30 '25
"Is the character wearing makeup or an accessory?" splits the OG board 12:12 without resorting to logic statements.
37
19
u/sea_enby Dec 30 '25
Isnât or a logic statement?
Also in this game are you allowed to ask âIs the character wearing makeup xor an accessory?â
4
5
2
Dec 31 '25
No, the question isnât âare they wearing [(A) makeup] or [(B) an accessory]â, itâs âare they wearing [makeup or an accessory] (options being yes or no)â
3
9
1
u/not-just-yeti Dec 30 '25
If you really wanted to get technical, you could make the rule "two turns before any question that would happen to divide the initial 24 suspects into male/female".
2
u/not-just-yeti Dec 30 '25
Yeah, it's just a sign of the times that something that is 50/50 in the population was made 20/80, just "happening" to over-represent the exact same side that is over-represented in (e.g.) Hasbro-game-designers, I'm guessing. Not overt sexism, but I'd put reasonable money that little thought was put in to that decision. The revised rule (50/50 split, but no questions about gender for two turns) is a great save.
6
u/martin86t Dec 30 '25
Itâs a terrible save. Adding an extra rule about how many turns into the game you can ask one specific question is the opposite of elegant game design. And letâs be real, NOBODY is reading the rules to Guess Who, lol.
A much better solution would be to eliminate the gender split on each board entirely. One board is all women, the other board is all men. That way you still have 50/50 representation of men and women, but avoid having a single question that guarantees splitting the options in half at the start of the game.
→ More replies (2)2
u/Impossible-Ship5585 Dec 30 '25
I think some versions ban askkng of gender
4
u/Meritania Dec 30 '25
We introduce a house rule where you canât ask the same question again throughout the game.
4
u/kytheon Dec 30 '25
Why would you do that anyway
3
u/Meritania Dec 30 '25
To keep the questions interesting
5
Dec 30 '25
No I think they mean who would ask the same question twice? That makes no sense, if you asked the first time, and got an answer, there should be no reason to ask a second time.
11
Dec 30 '25
[removed] â view removed comment
5
2
u/SupineFeline Dec 31 '25
Huh. Because I took it as once a question has been asked it canât be asked by the opposing player. So if I ask if your person has blonde hair you can no longer ask that for my person.
2
→ More replies (7)5
u/Mysterious_Fennel459 Dec 30 '25
Why would you ever need to ask the same question again? I'm trying to imagine a scenario where you ask, "Does your person have dark hair?" and then the next round, you feel the need to ask that again? Why?
1
→ More replies (2)1
u/Suitable_Werewolf_61 Dec 31 '25
While a kid I designed a tree of half-splitting questions, optimizing mean-time solving.
37
24
22
u/Domdaisy Dec 30 '25
I remember always being pissed if I drew Claire. Woman has red hair, a hat and glasses. You were fucked even if you instituted the âno asking genderâ rule.
17
15
u/sceneryJames Dec 30 '25
I customized Guess Who with the people who worked at our smallish company to help new hires learn names. It turned savage when established coworkers played. âDoes your person schedule needless meetings?â Etc
1
8
7
u/Sleepy-Flamingo Dec 30 '25
We would draw 2 or 3 cards and have to guess them all to amp up the difficulty. "Are they all male" "is exactly 1 female" etc.
3
u/Diarygirl Dec 30 '25
I was just thinking about this game the other day when one of my neighbors was trying to find out if I knew a relatively new resident in our building. "Does your person wear glasses? Does your person wear a hat?"
2
u/ElasticTurd Dec 30 '25
Woah now you cant just assume their genders
1
u/Heartt_Shaped_Potato Dec 31 '25
I did follow it up with "assuming gender based on looks and names"
2
u/ElasticTurd Dec 31 '25
And i didn't follow mine up with /s. That version is nearly 40 years old, I think we were meant to assume đ
3
u/deathtodickens Dec 30 '25
I made a version of this for my friends about 15 years ago. Drew all the people cards by hand.
It was so so so messy.
3
u/KiwasiGames Dec 30 '25
That was by design. A good Guess Who board has very few questions that split the board evenly in half.
Otherwise the game descends into a pure binary search algorithm.
2
u/Smart-Replacement841 Dec 31 '25
Yet by design it was the women who were the minority. The board was not 15 women and 5 men. I wonder whyÂ
→ More replies (1)
5
19
u/jimmydeanbacon Dec 30 '25
In all fairness, the United States in the 1980âs was predominantly male, with only about 20% female representation. Of which, a further 15% were of non-white descent. This is just reflective of the population distribution across ethnicities of the era.
22
10
u/Zeawea Dec 30 '25
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are saying here, no the US population was around 51% female in the 1980s.
11
1
→ More replies (3)11
u/Heartt_Shaped_Potato Dec 30 '25
Oh I get it. It just makes for pretty average game play, made me laugh.
2
u/rebelangel Dec 30 '25
I remember getting pissed if the person I drew was a woman. You were pretty much guaranteed to lose.
2
u/Glass-Bug888 Dec 30 '25
My sisters and I altered a few of the male characters with marker and white out.
2
2
2
2
2
u/Residenthuman101 Dec 30 '25
This game and half a set of Lincoln logs in a âstorage roomâ were the only things we had to play with inside at my grandmothers house as a kid. One time we discovered the wheelchair and boy did that get us yelled at lol
2
2
2
u/IamaHyoomin Jan 02 '26
I have played this exact version of the game, basically every single super obvious trait will apply to exactly 5 people. There's 5 women, 5 people with hats, 5 people with glasses, 5 people with mustaches, 5 with beards. It's just game design, not sexism.
2
2
u/AutoModerator Dec 30 '25
Reminder for OP: /u/Heartt_Shaped_Potato
- Is your post MildyInteresting?
- Be respectful at all times
Have a suggestion for us? Send us some mail!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
2
u/EconomyArm2272 Dec 30 '25
The old board games are such better quality. We got my son a Guess Who board game just this past Christmas and it's super flimsy I and can't imagine it getting through more than 5 years with how cheap it's made now.
1
1
u/Icy_Significance6436 Dec 30 '25
Me and my mates took all the pictures out and replaced them with doubled photographs of everyone in our friends circle.
"Are they a twat?" Was quite common...
1
1
1
u/escobartholomew Dec 30 '25
This canât have been the first question though. Itâs always been about 50/50 I thought?
1
u/BeautifuTragedy Dec 30 '25
Fun fact that's the classic board, you can swap out those pictures for celebrities or characters from a show
1
u/GamerDave360 Dec 30 '25
I bought my guess who about 10 years ago and it also has 5 women. The game was designed to ask narrow questions. That's why there are also 5 people with hats, 5 bald people and so on. (At least in the one I own)
1
u/santaland Dec 30 '25
But why is being woman a character trait or an accessory? Why aren't there only 5 men or why isn't everyone bald but 5 people.
→ More replies (5)
1
u/Cimorene_Kazul Dec 30 '25
It was like this with the 00s version, too. We had to ban the male/female question.
1
1
u/synister29 Dec 30 '25
Pros play two cards at a time. âAre either of your charactersâŚ?â âAre both of your charactersâŚ?â
1
1
1
u/jewel976 Dec 31 '25
Getting Hans was the best. He had no discernible traits, and was very average in all aspects. Nothing would rule him out, it was more a process of elimination
1
u/throwleavemealone Dec 31 '25
I think the same thing can be done with "does your person have blue eyes?"
1
u/According_Nobody74 Dec 31 '25
Iâm pretty sure you werenât allowed to use that as the first question. Maybe for this reason.
1
u/Spl4sh3r Dec 31 '25
Sometimes you are just lucky with the question. If it is this unequal with gender, then it is basically the same as getting lucky on the question if they have Green or Blue eyes in the standard version.
1
u/Tired-CottonCandy Dec 31 '25
The early 2000s version, i had, could be flipped like this in 2 questions if the answers were yes. "Is it a female" and "do they have blue eyes"
1
1
1
u/hashtagmollyno Dec 31 '25
We had this one growing up and my cousins and siblings all had an unspoken rule that one of the men (his name is Charles and heâs blonde with a handlebar mustache) counted as a woman if you asked the âboy or girlâ question.
1
u/bandashee Dec 31 '25
I saw someone somewhere playing this with family on their board instead of the standard cards. It was hilarious to hear holiday questions and family drama.
1
1
u/Dottore_Curlew Dec 31 '25
That jist seems like bad game design
I thought the "right strategy" was a core gameplay mechanic
1
u/Dependent_Novel_5932 Jan 01 '26
Hahaha I have the same one. Basically if you didn't have a white man you were screwed
1
1
u/jaysire Jan 01 '26
I just got this game and have been playing with my 6 year old⌠I was wondering if there are any faux pas questions, llike âis yours a girl?â, because it gives you so many hits. Everyone should start with that question. Anyway, my son asked me âdoes yours have anything on their head?â and I said no, because some of them have hats or scarves, but not mine. He ended up closing all, except two blad guys. You have to be careful with how you interprete the questions.
1
u/tomtomclubthumb Jan 01 '26
I had this version of Guess Who, I'm sure there are more women than that.
1
u/Nero_2001 Jan 02 '26
We always had the rule that we would not use questions about male and female because it gets rid of to many characters at once so this version wouldn't really be a problem.
1
â˘
u/image-sourcery Dec 30 '25
This is an automatic post that is used to detect image sources.
Reverse Image Search:
Google Images || SauceNAO || Google Lens || IQDB || Yandex || TinEye || Bing
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.