The Surprising Origins of the ‘Guess Who?’ Game

Two players sit opposite one another. In front of them both is a series of plastic tiles, each sporting an illustration of a distinctive face. The first person draws a card featuring one of those same faces; the other asks questions in the hopes of discovering their identity. If they do, the tile is folded down with a flick of the wrist.

For over 45 years, Guess Who? has been a fun diversion for millions of people. But despite the game’s popularity, relatively few players know about its inventors—a married couple from Israel who endured hardship to cultivate one of the most successful toy design firms in modern history.

1. Concepts of Play
2. The Guessing Game
3. In Memoriam

Concepts of Play

Theo Coster was born in 1928, and though he may not have felt it at the time, his childhood was firmly rooted in world history. He attended a segregated school for Jewish children in Amsterdam, where one of his classmates was Anne Frank. The diary she later kept while in hiding from German occupation would go on to become one of the most well-known books of the 20th century.

“In our class, she was simply Annelies, the name by which she was known to everyone,” Coster later wrote of Frank in his 2011 memoir, We All Wore Stars. “It seems that she herself preferred Anne. It’s the name she used in her diary and what appeared on the cover of the published edition. Be that as it may, in class it was ‘Annelies,’ and that’s what I’ve always called her.”

Anne knew Theo Coster by another name as well. In her writings, she mentions a friend named Maurice Simon. That was Coster: He later changed his name while taking refuge in the home of a Dutch family to escape Nazi persecution. Postwar, he trained as a printer, and in 1955, he headed for Tel Aviv, Israel, where he would see his personal and professional life change.

While at a party in Tel Aviv, he met Ora Rosenblatt, a former cook from the Degania Bet kibbutz in Israel. Ora had shifted her attention to becoming an artist and art teacher after serving in the Israeli Army.

At the party, Ora later recalled, she found little to like about Theo. Not long after, she purchased a Vespa and needed someone to teach her how to ride. She ran into Theo by chance while on a bus and remembered he owned a bike, so she asked him to teach her. Two years later, they were married. They would spend most of the next six decades together.

In 1965, Theo and Ora decided to start a design firm based on their respective talents: Ora had ideas, while Theo could turn them into practical products. (“She gives me a half-baked idea, and I bake it,” Theo once told the Detroit Free Press.) Their fledging business, Matat, which is Hebrew for gift, focused on novelty items that companies used in giveaways. (The name was later changed to Theora Design, a combination of Theo and Ora.)

But the couple had larger aspirations. “While working, designing, inventing, and even producing many small giveaway {and} premium items in the ’60s and ’70s Theora had … some larger ideas, mainly games,” the Costers’ son, Boaz Coster, tells Mental Floss. “They were {so} busy with all aspects of creation and supplying the new items to clients they did not focus on games and toys.”

It may have seemed less than ambitious, but both Theo and Ora had a knack for taking the mundane and turning it into big business. Their first major product came after the couple noticed a child playing with the wooden sticks left over from ice cream bars. Seeing him laboriously glue the sticks together to make a modest piece of construction, it occurred to Ora that there might be a market for Popsicle sticks made of plastic that could snap together easily.

The idea, which they dubbed Icetix, debuted in the late 1960s. Borden, a leading ice cream maker in the U.S., licensed the sticks for their products, renaming them Elsie Stix after their cow mascot. Kids loved the fact that their treats left them with a kind of building block to play with. Given the ubiquity of frozen treats, the number of Elsie Stix produced was into the billions, providing the pair with a degree of financial security thanks to royalty payments.

That allowed them to turn to more elaborate projects. “In 1968, at the same timeframe as Icetix they created One Too Many, one of the first figurative balancing games,” Boaz says. One Too Many involved constructing a pile of clowns in the hope they wouldn’t fall over. Waddingtons, which distributed Clue in England, picked it up. (It was later renamed Acrobats.)

Theora Design began focusing more on novelty games, again using unconventional inspiration. For a type of game where players could “pop” silicone nubs, Ora imagined a landscape of bubbles that one could press, describing them as “a field of breasts” to help Theo conceptualize the idea.  

The game, however, failed to launch beyond the prototype stage—at least, not at the time. Decades later, their sons Boaz and Gideon Coster licensed the concept to the Canadian toy company Foxmind, and Pop It! became the latest viral fidget toy sensation.

While Icestix may have been their most lucrative endeavor, it was their next game that would become the most familiar of Theora’s projects.

The Guessing Game

According to Boaz Coster, the inspiration for Guess Who? came from a word game the family played while traveling.

“We used to play at home and in the car the verbal game 21 Questions in which you must find a known person,” he says.

That evolved into a game released in 1971 called Wanted, which cast players as amateur police sketch artists. Participants would get a glimpse of a “suspect,” then attempt to draw them accurately from memory.

That led Ora to effectively combine the two ideas. In Guess Who?, players had to describe a character in the hopes of eliminating them from their set. (Ora illustrated all of the characters, many of which were rough-looking around the edges in the spirit of the earlier Wanted game.) When all 24 were guessed correctly, the game was over.

To Ora, Guess Who? had universal appeal for a simple reason: We’re all wired to recognize and evaluate faces. “Faces are the main object we look at, familiarize, and differentiate all the humans around us from birth onwards,” Boaz says.

The initial plan for Guess Who? was to put the characters’ faces on playing cards. Gaming companies, however, weren’t interested. Theo and Ora next tried to design a flat playing board where the faces could be marked off, but that didn’t entice them, either. Finally, a board with vertical tiles was assembled. It was that tactile component that made the game work.

“The main favorable features apart from the whole one-piece board that made it {successful} were the eliminating with a flip of a finger, a satisfactory click sound while knocking down the tiles with faces,” Boaz says.

Guess Who? was presented to executives at board game giant Milton Bradley in 1978, who eagerly acquired it for distribution. Though the game didn’t see a release in the U.S. until 1982, it quickly became a seminal part of many childhoods. In 2021, Deadline reported that more than 2 million copies of the game are sold annually.

In Memoriam

Theo and Ora continued designing games and amusements for decades, including games like Zingo, Play on Wordz, and Quips. Theo passed in 2019, shortly before Pop It! became something of a fad on TikTok. Ora passed in 2021. Together, the two conceived of roughly 190 games.

Theora Designs is now run by Boaz, his wife Aliza, and his brother, Gideon, who oversee Guess Who? as well as other products. That game, as well as many others, remain the property of Theora. Some have been licensed to various game companies.

In a testament to the game’s importance to the family, the headstones of both Theo and Ora bear a familiar design.

“After Theo passed away in 2019, we … decided to try and design a unique gravestone to honor and remember in a respectful way some of Theo and later Ora’s major achievements,” Boaz says. “I had an idea on my mind discussed with close family members and was also approved by Ora. We aimed to make the gravestone resemble and hint the shape of the flapping plastic of the Guess Who? game. We even went further back into designing an original letter font, in the shape and form of the legendary Borden’s Elsie Stix ice cream sticks that were made between 1969 {and} 1981 in the U.S.A. We are confident that they would approve.”

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