Who Am I?
| No. of Players: | 2+ |
| Type of Game: | spoken |
| What you need: | pen & paper or nothing |
Goal
To guess the identity of a famous person.
How to play
One player chooses a famous person, or a person all the players know well. He tells the other players the initial of that person's name (usually of the last name). Players try to guess the identity of this person by asking yes or no questions. The answers must be given with additional information which eliminates a famous person. So if the name begins with E, a player might ask 'Are you a singer?' and get the response 'No, I am not Sheena Easton.' If the answerer cannot think of an E singer, the questioner can then ask a general question like 'Are you a man or a woman?' The player who guesses the name correctly gets to choose the next famous person. If no player guesses correctly after a specified number of rounds or time has elapsed, a new famous person and initial is chosen and the questioning begins again.
A simpler version of this game is for all players except one to agree on a famous person. The excluded player then tries to identify the mystery person by asking questions of the other players in turn. These questions must be yes or no questions, and the mystery person must be identified before a set number of questions has been asked (say, twenty). To make the game easier, players can also give a hint with their yes or no answer. To make the game potentially more fun, one player can adopt the characteristics of the famous person, and all the other players then try to guess who it is.
Another way to play this game is to have one player write the names of famous people on pieces of paper. This player pins these names to the backs of all the other players. The players then try to guess who they are by asking questions about their identity. These questions again must be answered by a simple yes or no, or hints can be given. The first player to successfully guess who he is gets to write and pin names for the next round.
This game is similar to Twenty Questions.
Example
Amanda thinks of a famous person and tells the others the initial is R.
| Barrett: | (thinking of Jane Russell) Are you an actress? |
| Amanda: | No, I am not Martha Raye. |
| Claire: | (thinking of Rihanna) Are you a singer? |
| Amanda: | No, I am not Debbie Reynolds. |
| Dante: | (thinking of Ayn Rand): Are you someone who wrote the novel Atlas Shrugged? |
| Amanda: | I don't know that person. |
| Dante: | Ok then, are you alive or dead? |
| Amanda: | Dead. |
And so on, until someone guesses Amanda's choice of Ronald Reagan.
