A picture card you cannot see, worn on your head.

Hedbanz is a guessing game built around one idea: you wear a card you cannot see, and everyone else can. The name is spelled Hedbanz, without an “a,” in Spin Master’s statements and in the trade press, and the game is sold with the line “What Am I?” as its subtitle.

On 28 November 2012 The Toy Book reported that the Australian distributor Moose Enterprise had secured the Australian distribution rights for Hedbanz, which it described as coming “from Trends International.” The same report set out how it is played. Each player wears a picture card in a headband and asks quick questions to work out what they are; each correct answer lets the player get rid of a chip, and the game is won by the player who sheds all of their chips. The Toy Book described it as based on a classic play pattern, the “What Am I?” question game,.

Spin Master, the toy company The Toy Book describes as Toronto-based, came to the game in 2011. In August 2019 The Toy Book, in an article by James Zahn, and aNb Media, in an article by Jennifer Lynch, both reported that Spin Master had acquired the rights to Hedbanz for the United States and Mexico in 2011. In an interview with the Chicago Toy & Game Group published in October 2019, Spin Master’s games team in New York said the same: the company had originally acquired the US and Mexico rights in 2011.

Between those dates the rights were split by territory: Spin Master held the US and Mexico, and the 2012 Toy Book report shows Moose Enterprise taking Australian distribution.

Headbands, picture cards and a timer.

The visual vocabulary of Hedbanz comes from its parts. The headband holds a card facing outward, so the player wearing it is the only person at the table who cannot see the picture. The cards show everyday things — The Toy Insider, reviewing a later version, listed professions, animals, vehicles, foods and objects — and the questions are what make the game: players ask the others about the card on their own head until they can name it.

Spin Master has built new formats on that pattern. In January 2022 The Toy Insider, in a review by Khue Nguyen, described Hedbanz Blast Off!, which Spin Master introduced as a faster version of the game. It comes with two plastic headbands in different colours, one for each team, and a deck of “I am” cards. One player from each team wears the headband and turns a built-in timer knob; the guesser has roughly half a minute to work out the card by asking teammates questions, and if time runs out the card shoots out of the headband and the team loses the round. Both teams play at once. The review noted that cards from other Hedbanz games fit the Blast Off! headband slot.

The “I am” cards of Blast Off! and the “What Am I?” line that The Toy Book used for the game in 2012 and 2019 put the same question in the player’s own voice, and the headband with a card slot appears in every version the trade press describes.

The game has also moved onto phones. In August 2019 Spin Master launched a Hedbanz app for iOS and Android. The Toy Book reported that the app adds face filters that turn players’ faces into the card on their head, as an interactive element that can be added to the board game, and aNb Media reported that families could use it on the go.

Kids’ games and their owners.

A toy or game is usually met first as a box, and the lid does much of the work that a label does on a bottle or a can. It carries the name in large lettering, a picture of the thing inside or of children using it, and often a line of copy that the brand repeats for years. Because toy and game names change hands between companies, the same name can appear over the decades on lids printed by several different owners, each redrawing the lettering and the artwork in the style of its own time.

That makes the box worth reading as a record. The name on the lid, the company credited in the small print, the country of manufacture and the copyright line together show who made and sold a product at a given moment, and those details can differ from one edition to the next.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its boxes, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a US and Mexico licence to global rights.

The decisive change came in 2019. On 12 August that year The Toy Book and aNb Media reported that Spin Master had acquired the full international intellectual-property rights to Hedbanz. aNb Media wrote that the new acquisition gave Spin Master the ability to sell, market and license Hedbanz in its existing markets and to expand into new territories, and that the game is sold under local-language titles in other countries.

Spin Master framed the deal around its games business. The Toy Book quoted Anton Rabie, Spin Master’s co-founder and co-chief executive, calling the timing of the acquisition “serendipitous” and linking it to the opening of a new Long Island City office for Spin Master Games. aNb Media quoted Elizabeth LoVecchio, vice-president of marketing at Spin Master Games, saying the company was “excited to continue to grow the Hedbanz portfolio” and to introduce the new app to families and friends. In the Chicago Toy & Game Group interview published that October, the company’s New York games team called the international acquisition and the app launch a big win of 2019.

So the brand has a clear ownership line in the sources: a game from Trends International, licensed to Spin Master for the US and Mexico in 2011, distributed by Moose in Australia from 2012, and owned worldwide by Spin Master since 2019. Under Spin Master it has grown from a single headband game into a family that includes Blast Off! and an app, all held together by the same name and the same question.

For a design guide, Hedbanz shows how a short coined name and a single question can carry a game across editions and screens. Compare Meccano and Etch A Sketch, two other names now in Spin Master’s range. For this guide we use purple, card yellow and teal with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hedbanz’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.