I was inspired for the project by the fabulous Doctor Who Guess Who game made by Karen Kavett. I made my own version of the Doctor Who game by printing the cards Karen posted and painting a Guess Who game I found at Goodwill.
While I was in the middle of this project though I began to think how great a Harry Potter version of Guess Who would be! And thus a new project was born:
Harry Potter Guess Who : Good vs. Evil Edition
I chose to make this Harry Potter game with a more recent version of the Guess Who game board than was used for the Doctor Who version, mostly because it was an easier version to find at a Goodwill (my go-to stop when beginning a new project!)
The next step was choosing what characters to include and design the inserts with their pictures.
There are way too many characters to choose from!!
Guess Who has 24 slots, and I had a terrible time narrowing it down to that many! So I decided to make 2 game boards - one with all the "good guys" and one with the "baddies". Granted, some characters proved tricky - like Filch and Snape. Filch wasn't particularly evil but he was never very nice, so he ended up over there on evil anyway. And even though Snape played the part of a bad guy for most of the books, his tragic redemption at the end just necessitated his inclusion of the good side.
Fronts and Backs of Character Inserts
I designed all the inserts for the game boards to have the character's house colors as the background. If they didn't go to Hogwarts, or their house is unknown, the background is just white (good) or black (evil). And yes, there is one extra evil character. There was an empty space on the print out, so room for a bonus character. You get to choose which ones to include!
The Mystery Cards (the ones you draw from at the beginning of the game), are either white or black.
And of course, I painted the game boards to match.
Finally, it was time to design the box. This was a bit of a challenge to get the feel I wanted, include the information I needed, and to get it all to fit on a smaller square box. A few versions later, I came up with this:
The sides of the boxes feature the four main colors of the four Hogwarts houses, and four important characters - Harry, Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort.
So there it is!
Downloads of all the cards and the box design coming soon! (Computer can't handle another minute currently!)
