Guess Who
People love the board game for the nostalgia and then want none of the nostalgia in how it actually plays. Reworking it for a phone meant serving a design-literate thirty-year-old, a seven-year-old with eight minutes of screen time, and a grandparent playing from another time zone — with one interface.
Characters are assembled from traits at runtime — no character art to draw, and every combination is a valid opponent.
- Role
- UX/UI design · Front-end
- Type
- Concept — playable prototype
- Built with
- Next.js · Framer Motion · SVG
- Status
- Playable below
Three players who agree on nothing except the game.
The interesting constraint is not any one of these people — it is the distance between them. Anything that reads as polish to Nina has to stay out of Shawn's way, and anything that speeds Shawn up has to stay legible to George.
- Judges the craft
Nostalgic Nina
The hipster · 30
Appreciates well-made interfaces and pop culture. Wants something designed with care — and playable offline on a flight.
- Has eight minutes
Camper Shawn
Lives to play · 7
At summer camp with short, supervised windows of device time. Wants to relax and play with friends, fast.
- Needs it to be obvious
Grandpa George
The grandparent · 70
Devoted, and lives a long way away. Wants a genuinely easy way to spend time with grandchildren across the distance.
Entertaining and easy to use, in that order of difficulty.
Sorted rather than listed. A flat feature list lets everything look equally important, which is how a seven-year-old ends up three taps from a game.
- Must have
Data kept safe, multiple game types, and parental controls for the younger players.
- Should have
Customisable profiles, and nostalgia unlocked through classic modes and expansions.
- Could have
Chat with opponents, challenge friends live, run championship rounds.
A game you play with friends, family and strangers, in a variety of modes, coated in nostalgia.
A playable prototype, not a picture of one.
Pick a character, ask questions, narrow the board, and try to name the opponent's character before it names yours. The full game loop runs here — a flow diagram would have described this in a fraction of the time and proved none of it.
Guess
Who?
Sign up with:
Next.js, Framer Motion and Tailwind. Characters are composed from modular SVG traits rather than drawn, so the cast can be regenerated or extended without an illustrator.