Apples to Apples
The party card game that turned judgment calls into comedy—a deceptively simple game about matching nouns to adjectives, where the humor lives entirely in the judge's increasingly baffled decisions. Published in 1999 and an instant hit, Apples to Apples became the default game of 2000s classrooms, youth groups, and family gatherings, the one clean party game everybody's parents would allow. The golden rule taught a generation: the judge is always right, no matter how absurd.
Matthew Kirby and Mark Alan Osterhaus designed Apples to Apples, and Out of the Box Publishing released it in 1999. Gameplay is elegantly simple: a rotating judge flips a green-apple card bearing an adjective; everyone else plays a red-apple card with a noun, and the judge selects the best or funniest match. The game was immediately decorated with accolades: it won the Mensa Select award in 1999, was named Party Game of the Year by Games magazine in December 1999, and received the National Parenting Center's seal of approval in May 1999.
Out of the Box Publishing sold the rights to Mattel on September 8, 2007, and the game continued its reign as the default clean party game across 2000s classrooms, youth groups, and family gatherings—the one game your parents wouldn't object to, where the only rule that mattered was that the judge was always right. It later earned induction into the Origins Award Hall of Fame in 2019. Though adult-oriented party games like Cards Against Humanity would later emerge in a similar vein, Apples to Apples remained the generation's foundational party-game experience.
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