BoardGameArchiveGuess Who?
Ask yes-or-no questions to eliminate faces and identify your opponent’s mystery character before they identify yours.
Ask yes-or-no questions to eliminate faces and identify your opponent’s mystery character before they identify yours.
Guess Who? is a two-player deduction game built around binary questions. Each answer should remove as many possibilities as possible without risking a premature final guess.
Why it matters
The game’s most common questions concern what counts as a legal yes-or-no question, when a player may guess and the consequence of a wrong guess.
Game at a Glance
Mystery Characters
Each board shows 24 possible faces.
Yes-or-No Questions
Use answers to eliminate candidates.
One Mystery
Each player secretly chooses one character.
Championship Series
The first player to win five games wins the series.
Rules overview
Each of two players secretly selects one mystery character and keeps all possible faces visible on their own board at the start. On your turn, ask a question that the other player can answer yes or no about their secret character. Fold down faces inconsistent with the answer. Once you think you know the identity, make a final guess; under Hasbro’s C2124 rules, a wrong guess loses that game. A Championship Series is an optional sequence of games in which the first to five wins takes the series.
Questions that remove more possibilities
Count the faces still standing before choosing a question. If 16 remain, a feature shared by eight of them gives you roughly eight candidates after either answer; a feature shared by only one leaves 15 candidates on a “no.” The most useful split changes as faces are eliminated. This is a guide to choosing a question, not a fixed script: the actual character cards determine which features are evenly distributed.
Use features both players can identify consistently from the pictured faces. If a detail seems unclear, agree what it means before play. A final identity guess is worth considering when few candidates remain, but guessing while several plausible faces still stand risks losing the entire game. You can use a series of five wins to smooth out one lucky or unlucky quick guess.
Which Guess Who? box?
The C2124 Classic set uses two tabletop boards, 48 face cards, 24 mystery cards and scoring pegs. Hasbro describes its board style as a return to the original tabletop layout, in contrast to handheld boards. The face artwork and components can vary between editions, so do not assume a question based on a particular character or accessory will carry over to another box. Match the C2124 product code if you need the instructions linked below.
Teach a first round
Place the mystery card so the opponent cannot see it, leave all faces upright, and ask one visible-feature question at a time. After each answer, lower only the faces that cannot match. If a child lowers the wrong group, revisit the answer before the next turn rather than trying to reconstruct the board later. For a quick single game, stop at the first correct identity; use the scoring pegs when playing the optional Championship Series.
Learn Guess Who? in depth
Focused Guess Who? rules
Related games
- Clue / Cluedo — deduction from partial information
- Battleship — two-player hidden-information search
Publisher sources & scope
Hasbro Guess Who? Classic C2124 instructions. Facts checked October 2, 2026 against Hasbro’s C2124 product instructions.