- by Owen Morton
If I had one copy of the Star Trek Encyclopaedia for every time someone this year has emailed me and said, “When are you going to update your website?”, then by now I’d have one copy of the Star Trek Encyclopaedia. And that’s just because I already own one copy of the Star Trek Encyclopaedia. (Actually, I own two: one copy of the original edition, and one copy of the updated edition. How cool am I?) I haven’t updated the website for months, and people aren’t even bothering to ask me why. The point that I’m making here is that Heath the Rat’s Silly Page could, regrettably, be sliding into the oblivion of cyberspace, never to be heard from again, the witty discourse that we’re used to on this page being lost for ever.
But Heath the Rat was not a beast who went out gracefully. He in fact went out in one of the most graceless ways one can imagine: squashed by a car on the road that he was in the habit of taking a little nap in halfway across. And though his body has now been absent to us for ten and a half years (now there was a missed opportunity for an article last summer – the 10th anniversary of Heath the Rat’s Squashing), his spirit has remained with us in the ether, as we all know, inhabiting me every time I take to the computer keyboard and write another article for this website, which is approaching its fourth birthday now – scary, huh? The point here is that, despite my extremely slovenly attitude recently towards writing articles, Heath the Rat is not ready to disappear completely just yet.
And so, with that resolution firmly in mind, here is a brand new article, which I believe is the first for about four months. Unfortunately, I don’t really know what to write a website article about. I’m loath to start doing music reviews, even though music is one of my main interests, because music never quite reaches the heights of imbecility that I need before I can really talk about something (though ‘Ooh Stick You’ by Daphne and Celeste does come pretty close). He-Man episode reviews are a fairly useful standby, so we might see one of those soonish. Ever since the website began, I’ve had it in mind to do an article about Trapdoor, but because Trapdoor is just so good I’ve never felt able to do it justice. But for today, we’re going to talk about Guess Who.
Does anyone remember Guess Who? It’s a classic board game of the 1980s that me and my sister grew up on. It’s still available now, but – as with all things, even He-Man, as we know – it’s been updated for a new generation, and the new version is nowhere near as good. But let’s just assume that you don’t know what Guess Who is. I will here describe it to you.
Guess Who is for strictly two players. Both players have a board with pictures of 24 characters on them, pictures which can be put face down by use of an ingenious system of hinges. Each player takes a yellow card, which will have on it a picture of one of the 24 characters, and then they take it in turns to ask questions like, “Does your person have blue eyes?” or “Does your person have too many ears?” and that sort of thing. The first person to guess who is on the other player’s card is the winner. Naturally, variations on the game can be made, for those who seek something a bit more challenging. The box recommends “try the game with two yellow cards in the card-slot instead of one. You must then guess the identity of both your opponent’s cards to win.” This creates a greater challenge in that if you find that one of your opponent’s cards has brown hair, you can’t eliminate anyone yet, because you don’t know the colour of the other person’s hair. Jonathan Barker, the protagonist of a true classic of modern poetry, The Dance of the Jonathan, suggested that we take this further with three, four and even five cards. This proved to be insane.
The individuals in Guess Who have a wide variety of personal characteristics. There are five people with glasses (Tom, Claire, Sam, Paul and Joe), five people with blue eyes (Tom, Anita, Alfred, Robert and Peter) and five people who are bald (Tom, Sam, Bill, Richard and Herman). From this, one can conclude that given his wide range of characteristics, Tom is not a great character to have. There are also five women (Anita, Claire, Susan, Maria and Anne – though the latter only because of the name, ugly bitch that she is, not that the others are actually attractive, that is, but they do look vaguely like they’re female). The rules specify that you are not allowed to ask whether your opponent’s character is female until the second turn. I have never been able to understand why this should be. It is no more likely that your opponent will have a woman than that they will have any other characteristic, pretty much all of which have five characters. The exception is brown hair, which has only four (Robert, Richard, Bernard and Maria). I can only assume that you weren’t allowed to ask this question first because the manufacturers believed it would encourage sexual discrimination in the young and innocent minds they were targeting. Admittedly, this makes little sense, but the game is from the 1980s, an era when very few children’s things made sense.
I would like to comment that no one person on the Guess Who board looks even remotely like a normal person. I will admit that they are cartoon pictures, not photographs (Kate and I tried to create a version of Guess Who in which we used photographs rather than cartoons, and it didn’t really work, since everyone had brown hair and you couldn’t tell what colour eyes you had), and so they’re not supposed to look entirely real, but these are still the kind of freaks that if I met them in a dark alley, I’d run a mile. (Well, actually, I’d probably run about a hundred yards, then get out of breath, but I’d walk at a fairly speedy pace for the rest of the mile, at all times ready to break out into a run again if the individual in question showed up again.) Let’s take Joe, for example. His chin looks like an arse. Bill’s head is shaped remarkably like an egg. Maria is wearing a green beret – enough said there, I think. Robert, George and Bernard are the most miserable bastards you’ll ever see, Peter’s nose points sideways rather than forwards, Richard and Philip blatantly have false beards and Claire’s demented hat clearly points her out as a nitwit of the first degree. They’re weirdos, the lot of them. Apart from David, of course, who Kate says is quite fit really. She used to want to marry him, apparently.
But all in all, it has to be said that Guess Who, despite its being a freak show rather than a representative segment of society, is such a fantastically brilliant game that Kate and I play it at least once a day. Well, it beats browsing through my Star Trek Encyclopaedias.