Pyramid Online Magazine
"Pyramid Picks"
May 28 1999
Dan Blum
USA

Apples to Apples, the second game from Out of the Box (the first was Bosworth®), is a party game consisting of a big batch of cards with words and phrases on them - the players score points with them by trying to figure out how other people will think. Yes, I can hear you thinking "Gosh, how original" all the way over here. However, Apples to Apples is a very good party game, with a number of twists that make it stand out from the run-of-the-mill games that glut this area of the market.

There are two kinds of cards in the game -- 324 Red Apples, which are nouns, and 108 Green Apples, which are adjectives (all featuring art by Pyramid's very own John Kovalic). In addition to the cards, you get a plastic dealing shoe -- that's it for the components, making for a nice compact game. Green Apples tend to be fairly broad but specific enough to be interesting (e.g., "Luscious," "Confounding"), while Red Apples can be general ("bones"), specific ("Marilyn Monroe," "Berlin 1945"), or personal ("Your High School Prom"). Everyone keeps a hand of seven Red Apples from which to play, and Green Apples are used one at a time by the judge. The judge position passes around the table -- when it's your turn to be judge, you put aside your hand, take a Green Apple card, and put it in the center of the table while announcing what it is. Everyone else has to select a Red Apple card from his or her hand and toss it on the table (face-down) - quickly, because the last person to play has to take the card back and can't score in that turn. You then take all the Red Apple cards, display them (one by one, usually, and with appropriate commentary), and decide which one best fits the adjective on the Green Apple card -- using whatever criteria you like. You don't even have to explain your selection process, although of course doing so is where half the fun is (the other half is in seeing what ludicrous Red Apples other people play). Whoever played the chosen Red Apple card gets the Green Apple card to put in front of them. All Red Apples played are discarded (and replaced from the deck), and you pass the judgeship to the next player (you can discard Red Apples out of your hand and replace them, first, if you like -- judge's privilege). The winner of the game is the first to get four Green Apples, although of course you can vary this to suit the size of the group and the length of time you want to spend on the game. (Note that someone gets a Green Apple card every turn, so the game can only go on so long no matter what you do).

So, what's so great about this game? It's fast moving -- the last-in loses automatically rule means people play their Red Apples pretty quickly (often fast enough that they pick something they didn't really mean to, which gives amusing results). You have enough cards in your hand that if you don't have something appropriate for a given Green Apple, you're almost guaranteed to have something wildly inappropriate which will be good for laughs (and if you're more concerned with scoring points than producing laughs, you shouldn't be playing party games in the first place). The game provides a lot of variety -- you may go through a fair number of the Green Apples in a single game, but the next time they come up the players will be holding entirely different hands of Red Apples, so it won't matter if you just saw them last week. This is in contrast to games such as the otherwise excellent Taboo, which if you play often enough will tend to get a little dull because people will start to learn the best clues for the cards. You'll still want more cards of both types after playing enough games (and Out of the Box is already planning a 144-card expansion), but it will take a lot of games before it's really a necessity. In addition, the game can be played with any reasonable number of people (some party games are limited to six or eight players), doesn't get bogged down with a lot of fiddly rules which don't add to your enjoyment much, and is fun even when played with people you don't know very well. This last feature hardly makes it unique among party games -- Taboo, 25 Words or Less, and other games meet this criterion -- but it does differentiate it from games such as True Colors, Compatibility, Personal Preferences, and the many similar games which really only work if the players all know each other. Apples to Apples, unlike these, can be pulled out at a convention and played with people you've just met (it's small enough to carry around for this purpose, too).

Bottom line -- if you like party games at all, you can't really go wrong with this one. The one available copy at the convention I recently attended was almost always being played, and there was hardly anyone who didn't ask when it would be available in the stores (the answer -- the end of May). This was from a group of hardcore gamers who have seen everything, mind you. I expect the general public will enjoy it at least as much.

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