An idea from a family conversation, a Wisconsin publisher and two colours of apple.

Apples to Apples is a card-based party game that turns comparison into play. English Wikipedia describes it as originally published by Out of the Box Publishing and now by Mattel, and credits its design to Matthew Kirby and Mark Alan Osterhaus. Players hold a hand of “red apple” cards, each printed with a noun. A judge turns over a “green apple” card printed with an adjective, the others each play the red card they think fits it, and the judge picks a winner. The judge’s role then passes on, so every player takes a turn deciding what counts as the right match.

The idea is attributed to Kirby. A history of the game published by People of Play on 1 April 2024 says it grew out of an attempt to start a lively conversation with his in-laws, moving from a question about two writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, to stranger pairings such as Fitzgerald and Picasso, and then Picasso and a toaster. The same account says Kirby tested the idea with family and friends and took it to the Origins game convention in 1998, where he met Out of the Box Publishing, and that the game was published a year later, in 1999.

Out of the Box was a young company at the time. Wikipedia, citing the Wisconsin State Journal of 26 September 2004, says it was established in 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin, by Mark Osterhaus, Ellen Winter, Alan Waller, Cathleen Quinn-Kinney and the cartoonist John Kovalic, and that its first title was a four-player chess variant called Bosworth. In the summer of 1998, Wikipedia says, the company acquired the licence for Apples to Apples from Kirby; the game was then redesigned into its published form by Osterhaus, and the card content was written by Ellen Winter with help from family members, citing a 2013 profile of the company in the trade magazine Endplay.

The brand’s self-description was set early. The subtitle recorded in Wikipedia’s entry is “The Game of Hilarious Comparisons!”, and the winning card in each round is simply the one the judge prefers.

From Richland Center to El Segundo.

By the mid-2000s the game had grown into a family of products. Wikipedia says the original set — green adjective cards, red noun cards and a card tray — was joined by expansion sets, and that by 2005 the original box and its expansions had been retired in favour of an Apples to Apples Party Box combining the basic set with the first two expansions, followed by Party Box expansions. Apples to Apples Junior and Apples to Apples Kids were developed for younger players, alongside themed editions.

The publisher’s address had also moved. A press release issued by Out of the Box on 7 September 2007 carried a Richland Center, Wisconsin, dateline and described the company as headquartered there. It announced that the ownership rights to three product lines — Blink, Apples to Apples and Snorta — had been transferred to Mattel, Inc. of El Segundo, California. Mark Osterhaus, named as president of Out of the Box, said sales had grown to include major retailers and international markets and that Mattel was better suited to produce and distribute the games at that level, while Out of the Box would go on creating party, card and board games. Tim Kilpin, general manager and senior vice president of Mattel Brands, compared the new games with Mattel’s own UNO brand as easy to understand and family-oriented, and pointed to Mattel’s international distribution and brand management.

The trade press had reported the deal a few days earlier. ICv2, on 28 August 2007, said Mattel had acquired the rights to manufacture, distribute and market the three games from the Richland Center-based publisher, and described Apples to Apples as designed for players aged twelve and up. Wikipedia gives the date of the sale of the Apples to Apples rights as 8 September 2007, citing Out of the Box’s own archive. On 3 September 2007, Steve Jackson Games’ Daily Illuminator marked the sale by congratulating John Kovalic, noting that his artwork could be seen on the games.

Under Mattel the game has continued as part of a games line. Wikipedia says Mattel has kept updating the card sets and packaging and adding themed editions, and an archived 2024 version of Mattel’s games site lists Apples to Apples as one of its game categories. In 2019 the game was inducted into the Origins Award Hall of Fame, which the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design’s own hall-of-fame list records under Mattel Games.

Design and documentation.

Card and tile games carry their identity on a small set of objects that players handle again and again. The tuck box or lidded box is the first of them: it sits on a shop shelf, then on a home shelf, and its name panel, colours and illustration have to be recognisable from the spine as well as the front. A game’s name is often drawn as custom lettering rather than set in a stock typeface, and the same lettering may be redrawn when a publisher refreshes the range.

The card face is the second. Numbers, symbols and colours have to read quickly across a table, in low light and upside down, so a card’s layout tends to change slowly even when the box around it is redesigned. Card backs, by contrast, are where a brand’s pattern or mark can repeat across every card in the deck.

The third is the component that sits in front of each player — a tile rack, a tray or a board — whose shape and material can become as familiar as the name. Each guide looks at how these pieces have changed under successive owners, and at what the sources say about who designed them.

Two colours that are also the rules.

Apples to Apples has an identity system that doubles as its instruction manual. The two decks are named for two kinds of apple — red apples for nouns and green apples for adjectives — so the colour of a card tells a player what it is and what to do with it before a word has been read.

The card faces carry the brand’s character. A green card holds a single descriptive word; a red card holds a person, place, thing or event. The People of Play history quotes examples from the green deck such as “calm”, “funky” and “speedy”, and from the red deck entries such as “science fair projects”, “X-rays” and “New Orleans”. Steve Jackson Games’ 2007 note on the Mattel sale credited the artwork on the Out of the Box editions to the cartoonist John Kovalic.

Editions have stretched the system without breaking it. Wikipedia and the 2024 People of Play history record the Party Box, Junior and Kids versions, and demographic and themed sets, while the New York Jewish Week reported in 2011 that Jewish Educational Toys had produced a Jewish version. Each keeps the red-and-green split, and the judge who decides what counts as a match.

For a design guide, Apples to Apples shows how a colour code can carry the rules of a game, so that a box of cards reads as a single idea — red against green, noun against adjective — through a change of owner. Compare it with Phase 10 and Skip-Bo, two more card games now sold by Mattel. For this guide we use red apple, green apple and leaf with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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