Grab your Firebolts and dress robes and meet me at platform 9 ¾, because we are heading back into Hogwarts for a look at Guess Who Harry Potter!
Wands At The Ready…
Guess Who is a classic game of deduction for two players. Each player is given one card, and the other player has to guess who is on that card by asking yes or no questions. Players flip down characters until they have worked out which one the other player is holding.
Guess Who Harry Potter works in exactly the same way as the original Guess Who. But, this time, we Muggles are faced with rows of our favourite wizarding world characters to guess from.
Thinking Like A Ravenclaw
With the original Guess Who you can only ask questions based on appearance as we are given no backstories for the characters. This limits questions to things like ‘Are they wearing glasses?’ and ‘Do they have facial hair?’. This is where Harry Potter Guess Who showed its biggest difference.
My 7 year old quickly tired of the usual ‘do they have blonde hair?’ type questions and brought their Harry Potter knowledge into it. ‘Are they a teacher at Hogwarts?’, ‘Are they a Gryffindor’ and even ‘Did they survive the battle at Hogwarts?’. This gives the game a little more shelf life. My 4 year old can still play it based on the more typical questions, then as they get older you can make it harder by focusing on character/story questions.
One thing my son noticed was that Ginny Weasley and Neville Longbottom are missing from the line-up. Obviously, all the characters can’t be included. But these two were noticeably absent. It was nice to see a few creatures added in though, including Dobby.
Another game of the same theme we enjoy is Dobble Harry Potter.
Final Battle Thoughts
Guess Who Harry Potter is a very quick, light game to play with children. You can up the difficulty a little by creating house rules of questions that can’t be asked like ‘Are they female’ as this knocks out half the cast straight away. Overall, the kids enjoy it and it’s a good game to fill a small window of time.