Guess Who? — Play Free Online

About this Guess Who?

This Guess Who? is a single-player take on the face-guessing board game, built in HTML5 by Code This Lab, whose web address appears on the game's credits panel. You face a computer opponent. Each side keeps one secret character from the same set of cartoon portraits, and the first side to rule out everyone except the other's secret character wins. It is played with clicks or taps, so it works with a mouse as well as on a touch screen.

Turn by turn

1. Pick your face. At the start you choose which portrait the computer has to find. The CPU secretly picks its own.
2. Ask. On your turn a box at the bottom lists the questions still available. Scroll to one and confirm it. The game supplies the CPU's answer and lowers every portrait the answer excludes. A used question disappears from the list.
3. Answer. Next the CPU puts a question to you in a panel, and you press yes or no. Lying is not possible: if your reply does not match your chosen face, the game refuses it until you give the true answer.
4. Repeat until one board is down to a single face.

How common each trait is

There are 24 portraits and 15 questions. Counting the characters linked to each question in the game's settings file gives this spread:

Question about	Faces with the trait
Male	16
Earrings	11
Glasses	9
Moustache	8
Blonde hair, open mouth	6 each
Tie	5
Bald, brown hair, necklace	4 each
Black hair, beard, bunny ears, hair band	3 each
Bandana	2

Points

Your score rewards efficient questions. If one question drops more than 60% of the faces still up on the CPU's board, you see "Amazing!!!" and gain 100. Above 40% is worth 40 points with "Great!!", and above 26% is worth 10 with "Good!". A smaller cut scores nothing. Beating the CPU adds a 500-point bonus on top.

Playing it well

• Open with earrings. Eleven of the 24 faces have them, which is the closest any question comes to splitting the board in half, so either answer removes a big share.
• Glasses and moustache come next. Both sit near a third of the cast and keep cutting the board hard on the second and third turns.
• Hold back the rare traits. Bandana, beard or bunny ears only pay off once a handful of faces remain.
• Know how the CPU thinks. The code has it choose one of your portraits that is still standing and ask about a trait that portrait has, so its questions follow a guessed face rather than a plan to halve your board.
• A quirk in the code: the CPU's secret face is drawn from the first 23 portraits only, so Vito, the last one in the list, is never the character you are hunting.