In this paradigm, my family was guess culture, but this description leaves out the power games. The more powerful people, the adults, rarely explicitly made requests, but God help you if you didn't do what they wanted. And of course, they could remain selfless saints who never asked for anything for themselves. Since the request was never articulated, you never got to express why you didn't want to do it. Ever heard "Now, don't be like that" with "that" never defined?

Guess culture can be very useful for negotiating without anybody losing face or having to backtrack, but it definitely favors hierarchies.

Requires telepathy?

Or were there just subtle hints (and manipulation)?

if I asked for too much, I'd hear, "If wishes were horses, we'd all take a ride." That's a pretty decent version of no. My parents had a morbid gambit also. If I'd done something particularly outrageous (this is as a teen), the discovering parent would say, "If your (mother-father) knew about this it would just kill (him-her)." That ended one day when my mother said that and I noted that my father already knew about my offense and he was still quite healthy, to which she responded, "Oh, Michael!" That was the end of the tradition.

my family now is an "asker" tribe (the family I made ;).)

though not too strongly--a bit of guessing was sometimes involved. I'm a strong asker now.

This is an interesting way to frame things. For example, the director of my academic program is an extreme guesser who I goes out of his way to withhold information from people and then attacks them when they ask about it because they "don't know" and "haven't just figured things out." Bit of a problem since it's a new program that requires large amounts of clear communications and negotiation between people from very different backgrounds. Plus, it's supposed to be a very open, "flat" academic program in which faculty and students are respected on nearly the same level. So yeah, that hasn't happened.

This also explains why I and some other students have gotten on the director's bad side for "asking."

That's what guess culture was in the therapeutic 80s which applied to my family of "non-askers" growing up. I carry this "skill" with me into my new family and onto my children. My wife fortunately is teaching me to just ask, communicate, take words and meanings at face value and assume that actions towards others(within the context of family) are done with sincerity and openness. Not easy for someone who grew up guessing. nihil obstet's astute observation was spot on; power games (that often conceal heavy baggage from the past) are central in "guess culture" family.

and what nihil said about power games rings true.

"Guess" culture, if that's what you want to call it, is a manipulator culture if it's something done all the time. We all do it to some extent, some more than others and for people who do it all the time take a hike because eventually I'll have nothing to do with you. Remember men used to launch the charge of manipulation against women all the time because that's how they got their way in a male dominated society. Well it may have served a useful purpose then but now it's just games playing. "Ask and you shall receive." That's one of the few biblical phrases that I cherish. And I'm an atheist.

It is difficult to play the guessing language games if you can't speak the language well. They have no clue what you are trying to say.
In many Asian cultures, Americans are known for their brashness in asking. They also don't know how to play the guessing games in a different language.
I also think that southerners in the US, particularly of Scots-Irish heritage are more inclined to use guessing as a social strategy. I attribute this to the tribalism in the culture and the inability to just shrug off an inadvertent insult or loss of face...everybody needs to be real polite and oblique or mistakes get made and somebody ends up dying.