What Apples Apples By Nancy Elizabeth Wallace Actually Is
Apples Apples By Nancy Elizabeth Wallace is a creative project by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace that revolves around word-matching gameplay similar to the commercial party game Apples to Apples. Nancy reimagined the core mechanic with her own original card sets and thematic twists. I first came across this after looking for a home-version alternative to the retail party game. The premise is straightforward: you have green cards (adjectives/descriptions) and red cards (nouns/objects). Players submit red cards face-down, the judge picks one, and everyone tries to match with whatever green card they think fits best. The practical difference with Nancy's version is that the word choices lean more toward classroom-appropriate vocabulary. You'll find words like melodramatic, shiny, and chaotic on the description side, paired with nouns that don't require content warnings. That makes it useful for younger players or group settings where the official game might draw an eyebrow or two.
Here is how I set it up in practice. We printed the cards on cardstock, sealed them in sheet protectors with a laminate runner, and wrote the backs with dry-erase markers so we could track scores. Total setup time was about twenty minutes. Playing a round takes roughly fifteen to twenty minutes depending on how many people are arguing about whether spaghetti really is disgusting. The main limitation worth noting is that the card count is lower than the official game. If you have a full table of ten or more players, you will burn through the deck quickly and start repeating phrases. I solved this by creating a homemade add-on deck using a free word list generator and printing another fifty cards. It kept the home game going without needing to buy anything additional. If you want to find the actual cards, the most reliable approach is checking the creator's official website or Etsy listing. Nancy Elizabeth Wallace has distributed printable versions through those channels over the years, and the downloads are usually available as PDF files.
