Apples to Apples
It's from 1999, before you were born.
- Maker
- Out of the Box / Mattel
- Type
- Party card game
- Debuted
- 1999
- Note
- The wholesome ancestor of Cards Against Humanity
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About
As of 2026, it's 27 years old.
Apples to Apples cropped up in 1999 as the breakout party card game of its era: a rotating judge plays a descriptive 'green' card (like 'Scary' or 'Hilarious') and everyone else submits a 'red' noun card from their hand, trying to convince the judge theirs is the best match. The fun is the absurd justifications and learning how your friends' brains work.
Its judge-picks-the-funniest formula was so successful it directly inspired the much raunchier Cards Against Humanity a decade later — making Apples to Apples the wholesome, family-friendly grandparent of an entire party-game genre.
Clever, wholesome, and genre-spawning, Apples to Apples is the party card game that made matching words a riot — and quietly invented the format everyone copied.
