They’re Not Shy About Playing Apples to Apples

By EZRA R. SILK | Courant Staff Writer
August 7, 2007

In the quiet of the night, Lauren Bell, 17, a rising senior at Hall High School in West Hartford, creeps out of her house to hang out with some friends, many of whom are boys whom she doesn't know very well. As the rest of the town sleeps, Bell and her new friends laugh deep into the night as they get to know each other more intimately.

Bell and her friends aren't drinking. They're not smoking pot or having sex or doing anything naughty.

They're playing Apples to Apples, a relatively innocent and simple board game that can break the ice in awkward social situations and, for that reason, is now widely regarded as a cool thing to do with friends or strangers at night.

The game, which was created by the fledgling Out-of-the-Box company in 1999, is now projected to sell many more units than it sold in its successful first year and is quickly developing more fans as the company grinds out biblical, Jewish and British versions.

The game is easy to learn. Every player (there are usually a lot) is handed seven cards with nouns and names such as cheese, Helen Keller, Bangkok or Adam Sandler. One judge (there is a new judge every round) randomly picks an adjective, such as hilarious, and the other players hand in a noun - face-down - to match the adjective that they think the judge will pick. If the judge is looking for a literal match, then Adam Sandler as hilarious would be a good choice (depending on one's sense of humor). A goofy judge might pick cheese. For irony, Helen Keller. Whoever put in the card the judge ultimately chooses is given one point and, depending on the interpretation, is the judge the next round. In the end, whoever has the most points wins.

Maddie Bronstein, 19, a West Hartford resident who attends Elon College in North Carolina, has been addicted to the game since she started playing at a friend's beach house party on Memorial Day.

"When we were at the beach, I got so obsessed with the game that I forgot we were having a party," she said. "I play every night, now - with my girlfriends on boring nights and with guys at parties."

The over-20 crowd is playing, too.

"I can't sit down and play something for more than 20 minutes usually," said Chris Friar, 21, of West Hartford, a graduate of Keene State College, which the Princeton Review describes as having a "heavy party scene." "But I could play Apples to Apples forever."

Josh Smilowitz, 22, a student at the University of Connecticut, thinks the game could be the next big thing, not to mention a good way to meet girls.

"Basically, you're speaking to people who you might be too shy to talk to in the first place," he said. "It opens you up. Instead of needing to get drunk in order to meet girls, you can play this game and learn more about them in a more sophisticated manner."

In fact, Bronstein, while looking through pictures on her Facebook account, discovered that some of her college friends in other cities are playing, too.

"I was looking at my friend from Arkansas' Facebook pictures, and she was playing Apples to Apples with her friends," Bronstein said. "I had never talked to her about it before. It really is huge lately."

In 1998, businessmen Mark Osterhaus and Al Waller decided they were tired of cubicle life and wanted to create a board-game company that took new approaches toward gaming - play driven by ideas "outside of the box." The first game for Out-of-the-Box was a variation on chess called Bosworth, but it had limited success.

"The company could not have survived on Bosworth sales alone," said Matt Mariani, director of marketing.

In 1999, after a year of moderate sales, a struggling inventor named Matt Kirby came to Osterhaus and Waller with a complicated board game called Apples to Oranges that had been rejected by big game companies, including Hasbro and Mattel.

The original version, Mariani said, came with a giant box, an oversized board and a number of pieces. It also required players to take the extra step of landing on a specific square to earn the right to play. Kirby's game was convoluted, but Osterhaus and Waller saw something in it.

With Kirby's permission, Osterhaus simplified the game. The revamped version became Apples to Apples and won fans among hard-core board gamers as word spread over the Internet.

In its first year, Apples to Apples received Games magazine's Party Game of the Year Award, the National Parenting Center's seal of approval and the prestigious Mensa Select Award for games.

In 1999, 20,000 units of Apples to Apples were sold, and sales have increased every year since, Mariani says.

Lauren Bell is happy her mom recommended the game to her. It's helped her meet some new friends, she says.

"We just started hanging out with these people," she said. "They're athletes and party boys. I don't think they're embarrassed. They get very into it."