Guess Who

This week I visited New York and stayed with my cousins while their mother was in the hospital. Over the course of several days, my younger cousin, K, and I hacked the board game ‘Guess Who?’

Guess Who is not so terrible for a kids game. Or at least, it didn’t seem so bad after several rounds of ‘Pretty, Pretty Princess’. But it gets old fairly quickly and it’s also a little sexist/racist. (Five of the thirty-two faces belong to female names - and all are stereotypically feminine-presenting. A half dozen of the faces, at best, look like people of color.)

The change we made was straightforward. We cut out pieces of paper the size of the little colored cardboard pieces that come with the game, and drew 32 new people, places, things and ideas to slip into the game board. You can see my efforts to be educational: I included Barack Obama, Rosalind Franklin, Julius Caesar, and the Pleiadaes. My cousin included the cat she petsits, Elmo, and a toucan.

As we were cutting and drawing, it occurred to me that you could make the game super-educational by creating themed sets of 32. 32 famous female leaders. 32 great inventions. 32 scientists. 32 presidents (there are definitely 12 worth forgetting anyway.) The game inherently requires looking for similarities between people as well as looking for differences, which is a great way to explore a subject. It would slow down game play a lot, but imagine fielding the request, “Was your President in the military?” or “Was your scientist’s invention/discovery recognized in their lifetime?” You’d learn so much!

Of course, the real question is: given my tendency to make any given moment as educational as possible, and my near intolerable enthusiasm for feeding them vegetables, how do my cousins answer when I knock on the door and ask, “Guess who?” The answer is still, luckily, with delight.

We’ll see what it is when I give them the hacked Presidential version of this game for Christmas, though.