Apple Crack, the FAQ

I figured I’ve talked so much about Apple Crack, and that there’s a great lack of information concerning exactly how to play, and so I’d like to take a stab at some instructions .

Apple Crack is Your Friend
Apple Crack is a homebrew variant of the popular party game “Apples to Apples,” published by Out Of The Box Publishing. At its core, it is a game of word association, but even though that description makes it sound like only kindergarteners would play it, it can be an uproaringly good time. Particularly when drinking is involved.

This game is for 3 – 15 people, but a decent-sized group is around 5 – 7.

For set up, you’ll need:

• Two different decks of 3″x5″ index cards, in two separate colors. For our games, we used white and yellow index cards.
• One pen per person, preferrably all of the same kind.
• Did I mention alcohol?

Everyone draws five blank yellow cards. For player one’s turn, she picks up a white card and writes an adjective or topic on it, like “Things I would do for a cookie” or even simply “Awesome,” and then they state the card and show it to everyone else. Everyone except for player one writes an answer for the prompt on a yellow card and turns it in face down, like “Man with 12 hula hoops” or “I can’t believe it’s not butter.” Once everyone’s finished writing in an answer, player one shuffles the cards and starts reading them aloud. Then she picks one card as the “best” answer to her white card, and the owner of the winning yellow card gets to hold on to the white card and keep it as a point. Save all the cards in a pile elsewhere, you’ll use them later, and draw more yellow cards to keep five cards in your hand. Rinse, and repeat. Usually, the game ends when one person reaches 7 cards in their white pile, but oftentimes, we’ll just see who’s got the most once we’re all too tired to play anymore.

Once your group has played through the game a few times, you’ll have amassed a large collection of white and yellow cards, and you have essentially made a deck to play with from here on out. And so, we usually have on hand a whole bunch of blank cards, for whoever feels the need to add to the deck. I typically draw four filled yellow cards and one blank one to make my hand.

And so, that begins my ongoing coverage of Apple Crack here. In future weeks, I’m thinking of blogging about the different cards we’ve written in (edited for content, of course) and variants of the game. I’m also considering writing up a Wikipedia article on Apple Crack.

If you have anything you’d like to add or revise about my instructions, let me know in the comments.