Making Project: Pokemon Guess Who?

 

Pokemon Guess Who?

My oldest daughter got a Guess Who? game for Christmas this year, and she loved it!  

I have fond memories of playing travel Guess Who? on long family road trips.  The updated version no longer includes my favorite character (Frans).  But on the bright side, the game has been vastly improved by equalizing the gender mix - the original version had 19 men and only 5 women!

In addition to going crazy for Guess Who?, my daughters were also in the midst of some Pokemon-mania! And this gave my oldest daughter an idea: What if we made a Pokemon Guess Who?  What if, indeed.

Before diving into this project, there is something that you need to know: There are 72 cards in this game. At the very least, you or your kid are going to be drawing & coloring 24 different images.  That's a big commitment!  I made it clear to my oldest daughter that this was going to be a lot of work, and that I didn't want to start this project if she was going to abandon it halfway through. She assured me that she was committed though, so we decided to give it a go.

The first thing to do is find a piece of Bristol board.  You can use cardstock too, but printer paper is going to be too flimsy.  I carefully measured the larger cards (the ones that you use to pick your character, not the ones that slide into the flip-down game pieces), and then drew a big grid on the Bristol board. Each square of the grid was size of the larger cards.    

12 Pokemon

 
In order to add a little more substance to the game, my daughters and I decided to add a little extra info on each card: We put a symbol for the Pokemon type (water, grass, fire, etc.), and a number to indicate with stage the Pokemon was in its evolution (1,2,3).  This allows the girls to guess things like, "Is your Pokemon an electric type?" or "Is your Pokemon a Level 2 Pokemon?"

Before cutting the cards out, I scanned all of the drawings, shrunk them down, and printed out 2 more copies on some extra thick printer paper. This took a little trial and error to get them printed at the right size to fit in the flip-down card holders, but eventually we got it right.

12 More Pokemon

As you can see, we (I) didn't do a great job measuring where the name should go on each card.  When we put them into the card holders, the names were completely obscured, and some of the numbers & symbols were partially covered up as well.  The moral: measure twice, draw/print/cut once!

It's Sylveon!

Here's some close-ups of some of the cards.

Total Time: ~ 3 hours

Total Cost: < $5 + a Guess Who? game

Total Difficulty: Medium