Our son won’t let me escape Apples to Apples

After our son played Apples to Apples, the emoji version, he has been wanting to revisit the game. Now, I’d gotten rid of my copy of Apples to Apples ages ago. So we went to the nearest thrift shop because you can always find Apples to Apples at them.

While they didn’t have the emoji version our child craved, they did have the party box and the travel edition. Since I’m pretty sure the travel edition has unique content, getting both at thrift shop prices wasn’t a tough choice. (And a whole bunch of unopened Fimo clay so good trip)

Man, I cannot escape Apples to Apples. I own Dixit, for crying out loud, but not even that will save me from Apples to Apples.

And, while Apples to Apples bores me at this point, I can see why it still works.

When I was a wee little gamer, Trivial Pursuit became all the party game rage. It combined the worst aspects of roll and move with questions about minutiae. There can be good uses of both those elements (pub trivia, Backgammon, That’s Life) but Trivial Pursuit managed to be potentially long and frustrating.

Apples to Apples can end whenever the group feels like it and, quite frankly, strips away the skill requirement that almost all party games (or games at all) have. You don’t need to draw or to sing or to pantomime or have a large vocabulary or know the principle export of Zanzibar in the 1920s.  (Was it cloves?)

Which, on the face of it, sounds horrible. I mean, some kind of mental stimulation is the point of games. RCL is horrible because you just do whatever the dice tell you to do. Apples to Apples, though, is actually nothing but social interaction with a loose structure. 

Which can be horrible for some people.

But Apples to Apples has a very low entry bar. It can let a wide variety of people interact with each other. It focuses on the party part of party game, not the game  part.

And that incredible level of accessibility is why I can’t escape Apples to Apples. My child wants to play it. Random friends of his grandparents want to play it. It is the intersection of all kinds of people.

We have taken steps to have better party games

I don’t see myself playing a lot of holiday games this year but there is one game that I have come to associate with the holidays. Apples to Apples, since it’s the party game you can play with anyone. The party game that I have seen played at more Christmas parties than any other game.

I have two strong opinions about Apples to Apples. First, it’s a very strong game design. Second, I could happily never play it again :P

Back when I was a young one, Trivial Pursuit was the ‘great’ party game and I think it’s a terribly flawed game. Trivia is dangerous because it’s so binary, either you know it or not. (Wits and Wagers figured out how to make that work which is amazing. And pub quiz adds booze, which changes everything. You can decide if it’s for better or worse) And it had a meh implementation of Roll and Move.

So, when you consider that I came from a place of charades and Trivial Pursuit, Apples to Apples was a revelation. It was accessible to the point where you could play it with just about anyone and people didn’t get punished for not knowing the capital of Zanzibar or how to mime Christopher Walken.

I know Apples to Apples wasn’t the first ‘designer’ party game (Barbarossa came out before it did, for example) but Apples to Apples was my first experience with it and the first experience for many folks I know. I really think it changed the party game genre.

BUT I think that the ideas that it introduced have been done better since it came out. I would much, much rather play Dixit than Apples to Apples for example. And, yes, I know that tells you how old I am :D I really do think that Apples to Apples paved the way for better, more innovative party games, games that surpassed it.

I’m not big into party games but I do sometimes play them and I’m glad they have gotten better.

A belated good-bye to Out of the Box

I just learned that Out of the Box went out of business back in 2015. Man, am I behind the times.

I'm sad to see that they're gone. When I first started collecting and playing designer games, they were a company that I paid attention to. Along with Playroom and Gamewright, Out of the Box seemed to approach family games and kids games with a designer touch. (To the best of my knowledge, both of those companies are alive and well)

Part of their mission statement was that their games would take five minutes or less to learn and a half an hour at most to play. Which certainly doesn't work for a lot of games but it isn't a bad rule of thumb for casual family games. And there's no denying that, even compared to Playroom or Gamewright, that was their intended audience.

While I think that the best thing they did was publish the 10 Days lines of games, which combine good game design with high educational value, I don't think I can get around their most significant contribution to gaming was Apples to Apples. 

It's not my favorite party game and I know folks who utterly despise it but there's no denying it changed the face of party games. Admittedly, by being so accessible/accessible that you don't have to be creative to play. No need to know trivia or be able to improv or draw. For better or for worse, it was an ideal family reunion game. And it went to influence other game designs, Cards Against Humanity being the most obvious.

Heck, when they sold it to Mattel, I seriously had doubts for Out of the Box's future. And they did hang out for another seven years but they never had another hit like that. Still, twenty years from now, Out of the Box is going to be remembered for letting Apples to Apples loose on the world.

Looking over their catalog, they actually released fewer games than I remembered. And many of them frankly never interested me. But there were some gems in addition to 10 Days. Basari bridged the line between casual family and euro pretty well while I have had a lot of fun with Cloud 9 and Easy Come, Easy Go.

Yeah, the fact they've been out of business for close to two years and I didn't notice means Out of the Box stopped being important to me. And the games from them that have stayed in my collection are some of their older ones. But they did put out some fun games.