Apple Crate: a lesson in packaging

Apple Crate. You can think of it as the coffee table edition of Out of the Box Publishing's innovative, no-right-answer game Apples to Apples. But it's more than a new edition, it's a lesson in the art of packaging: Put a good game in a fine, wooden box, and suddenly you have something worthy of your most respectable company. It's the very same game that you've played in the kitchen, with the kids. Well, actually, it's the "core" game (get it? Core, as in apple core) plus the first two expansion sets. And there is a certain je ne sais quoi about having all those cards in one box....But having them in one box, and a finely crafted wooden one, at that, puts the whole game in a different context. It becomes a fine thing - even in the sophisticatedly jaded eyes of the discriminating adult - a collectible.

Take heed, Defenders of the Playful. Apple Crate is more than Apples to Apple in a box. The Crate is one great leap for grown-upkind.

Crate creates the needed dignity; gives the necessary permission. It makes Apples to Apples seem grown up. It looks like something worthy of the upwardly grown. And yet, it's still Apples to Apples. Still as funny and irreverent and inclusive and as fun as it has always been. Only now, just because of a nice wooden box and a more cards, we who Just Want to Have Fun have an new invitation to a wonderfully silly game that could intrigue even our guests, even our parents, our bosses and secretaries and leaders and neighbors, even our in-laws.