The Mystery Face Game

 

Drew has this old Guess Who? game that we used to pull out whenever we were home from New York and killing time at his parents’ house. They finally sent it back to our apartment with us today, in the last box of his old stuff, and so we sat down to play a game.

But it’s too easy.  I mean, the game is for 6-year-olds, and the box suggests questions like, “Does your person wear glasses?” and “Does your person have blue eyes?”  Which…I thought you’re supposed to ask second-person questions?  “Do you have a hat on?” and “Do you look like an escaped convict?”

So in the past, in order to give the game an extra twist, we’ve restricted questions about gender, and anything to do with color.  But the game still lasts all of about 4 turns each, or about 60 seconds.

So today we started a new rule: Only questions about their occupations. 

We played three games this way, and it does take longer. 
1) You have to study all the faces you have left and come up with a good occupation that would help you narrow it down: “Are you in fashion?” 
2) Then you have to interpret the other player’s response: “Um…yeah? Yeah, I guess so” is a very different response from, “OMG yes.” 
3) Then you have to apply that response to all the faces, and use your best judgment whether or not to flip that little person down.

It was actually much harder than regular Guess Who?  In fact, no one won any of the three games we played.  Every game ended something like:

“Are you Sam?”

“No!  I’m Max!”

“What??  Oh, I guess Max might be a waiter.”

This was our Guess Who? swansong, because Drew is going to donate the game to his work.  But I did like the 10 minutes of fun it provided this afternoon!