This evening, I played Apples to Apples with my family. For those who aren’t acquainted with the game, people draw a hand of seven red cards. Whoever’s turn it is draws a green card and everyone else places one of their red cards on the table; the card they think the person who drew the green card is most likely to associate with the green card.

Whoever’s card gets picked wins the turn. So, let’s say that I drew the green card “Weird”. One person might have the words “Spam”, “Steve Martin”, “Falling Down”, “Bagpipes”, “Fast Food”, “Toasters” and “Summer Camp”. They might know that I used to play bagpipes and find nothing weird about falling down, spam or Steve Martin. They might choose “Summer Camp”, knowing that I had some weird experiences at summer camp.

Another person might have “Toasted Marshmallows”, “The FBI”, “Construction Workers”, “The End of the World”, “Global Warming”, “Crazy Horse”, and “The Titanic”. They might think that I would be unlikely to find any of these weird, but would choose “The Titanic”.

Finding “Summer Camp” weirder than “The Titanic”, I would choose “Summer Camp” and the first person would win the round.

So, could we play this online? It might be fun on Twitter or a similar microblog. The simplest way would be if everyone just used their Apples to Apples cards and had a middle person act as an Apples to Apples moderator. The play, with the example above might look something like this:

ahynes1: @a2amod Weird
khynes2000: dm a2amod Summer Camp
fehynes: dm a2amod The Titanic
a2amod: @ahynes1 The Titanic or Summer Camp
ahynes1: @a2amod Summer Camp

Then, whomever’s turn is next would draw a green card and send a message to the Apples to Apples moderator.

Anyone want to play?

Beyond that, it could probably be set up as a good Web 2.0 application where you are dealt the cards by the server automatically, and the server would gather responses, keep score, etc. That would take some programming to set up, but seems doable. The problem would be to get the rights to do this from Mattel, or to create a game that is substantially different enough to not run into infringement issues. Considering that Mattel already has a website up to promote Apples to Apples, which has a simple hand of the game played against a computer, instead of against other people and microblogged, that might be a challenge. However, a smart marketing person at Mattel might job on this.

Instead of using words from existing Apples to Apples decks, using popular hashtags in Twitter might be an interesting variation.