Fast “Who am I?”: A Fun Game to Play with Friends

A silly fun game to play rapidly with your friends and loved ones in 2023.

I thought this would be a fun thing to be my first non-fiction post in 2023 — my boyfriend and I over the Christmas season were, as a lot of people were, playing Heads Up! and also doing the Who am I? stickers out of Christmas crackers.

The premise of Heads Up! is that you hold your phone up to your forehead facing the room of other plays and, without saying what the person or thing is, they have to give you clues as to what it is. Once you get it, you tip your head forward and reveal the next clue, but because the game is played on a timer, you want to be going as fast as possible and skipping the ones you can’t get.

Who am I? is a way more basic premise — you stick a post-it note or a sticker to someone’s head, and they ask questions (especially yes or no questions) to determine who they are.

What we wanted was to play something that would be as fun as these but that we would be able to generate based on our own interests, and since we started last week, we’ve played a lot together but also with other friends, and it’s great.

I’m gonna go over some tips and what we did for working out our categories after I go through the initial set-up and play instructions. This game is particularly great for sharing special interests with each other, whether this is an ice-breaker in a room of people with hyperfixations and special interests and beloved obsessions, or whether it’s people you know and love where you have a shared knowledge of each other’s area of study.

Very simple! Just a bowl with some paper in it!

What You Need:

• some paper
• a writing implement
• some scissors or some other way to cut the paper up into pieces
• a bowl or other container

The Set-Up:

1. Each person gets a piece of paper and something to write with. Decide on a theme or categories, and have each person write out, without showing the other players, 30 or so entries to the pot.
2. Separate out the entries so that each one is on a singular piece of paper, either by cutting them out or by…