Apples to Apples rules: how the judging works and how to win
* Difficulty is our editorial read on how hard the game is to pick up — not an official rating. Player counts and deck sizes come from the game's rulebook.
Apples to Apples is a party game for 4 to 10 players, built around two card types: red cards naming a person, place, thing, or event, and green cards naming a descriptive word. Each round, one player judges. The judge reveals a green card, everyone else privately picks their best-matching red card, and the judge picks a winner without knowing who played what. Collect enough green cards and you win.
Setup
Deal 7 red cards to every player, including whoever judges first. The green cards and red cards stay as two separate stacks the whole game, never shuffled together. The judge role rotates one seat to the left after every round, so everyone gets a turn deciding what counts as the best match.
Gameplay
The judge plays a green card
The current judge draws the top green card from its stack, reads the descriptive word out loud, and sets it face-up on the table for everyone to see. That word is what every other player will be matching a red card to for the rest of the round.
Submitting a red card
Every other player looks through their own hand of red cards and picks whichever one they think the judge is most likely to pick as the best fit, whether that's the most accurate match, the funniest, or just the most defensible argument they can make out loud if asked. That card gets placed face-down, unseen, into the middle of the table.
Judging
Once everyone's submitted, the judge collects the face-down cards, shuffles them so the order gives nothing away, and turns them over one at a time. Nobody signs their card, so the judge picks a winner purely on the card itself, with no idea whose it was. Whoever played the winning red card keeps that round's green card as their point, and every player who submitted (including the round's winner) draws back up to a full 7-card hand before the judge role passes to the next player.
Scoring
There's no separate points system layered on top of the cards themselves. Every green card a player wins for having the best-matching red card simply counts as one point, and those green cards accumulate in front of each player as the game goes on.
| Number of players | Green cards needed to win |
|---|---|
| 4 | 8 |
| 5 | 7 |
| 6 | 6 |
| 7 | 5 |
| 8–10 | 4 |
The target scales down as the table gets bigger, since a bigger group means fewer rounds where any one player gets to judge, and fewer chances overall to win a green card. Some groups skip the target-score approach altogether and just agree on a fixed number of rounds ahead of time, ending the game whenever that round count is reached and whoever has the most green cards at that point wins.
Variations and house rules
A few tables let players briefly argue their case before the judge picks, turning a normally silent decision into a short, semi-serious pitch for why a particular red card fits best. It's an easy add-on that doesn't change scoring or setup at all.
Playing to a fixed number of rounds instead of a green-card target, mentioned above, is popular for game nights on a schedule, since it guarantees the game wraps up by a known point rather than running until someone happens to hit their target. For another popular party card game with a faster, higher-stakes feel, Exploding Kittens swaps the judged format here for elimination and bluffing instead.
FAQ
How many cards do you start with in Apples to Apples?
Every player is dealt 7 red cards at the start, and hands get topped back up to 7 after each round once the judge collects that round's green card winner.
How does the judge get picked each round?
The judge role simply rotates one seat to the left after every round, so it cycles through the whole table evenly over the course of a game.
What's the actual win condition?
Collect enough green cards to reach the target for your table's player count, which scales from 8 (in a 4-player game) down to 4 (in an 8-to-10-player game). Some groups skip the target entirely and just play a fixed number of rounds instead.
Can you play with more or fewer than the standard player count?
The game is built around 4 to 10 players, and the win-target table scales specifically across that range. Fewer than 4 players removes most of the judging variety the game depends on, since there aren't enough submitted cards each round to make picking a winner interesting.
Is there strategy involved, or is it mostly about the judge's taste?
Mostly the judge's taste, and that's the entire appeal for most groups. Reading what a specific judge tends to find funny or fitting round over round is the closest thing to strategy the game has, rather than any fixed rule for which red card objectively "wins."