So you want to play Cards Against Humanity but you don’t have any friends. Or more likely, because you are all delightful, you don’t want to wait for special get-togethers to play. There’s an app for that! Evil Apples isn’t officially connected to CAH, but the gameplay is pretty much the same. The best part is, you can start a game whenever and wherever you want!
If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the premise of Cards Against Humanity and Evil Apples, they’re adult versions of Apples to Apples. Each player has a set of cards from which to come up with the funniest way to fill in the blanks from a set of prompts. A judge then picks their favorite response, and the first player to win seven hands (in Evil Apples) is the winner. The game isn’t for the faint of heart or easily offended — you have to be at least 17 to download it, and the answers can get pretty raunchy.
Evil Apples lets you earn two different forms of currency, cake and coins. You earn five coins for each hand you win, plus a bonus if you win the game. Cakes work a little differently depending on how you play; you earn one slice for each friend game you start, while you have to pay one slice to join random games (but earn three if you win).
There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways to play Evil Apples. Random play moves much more quickly; you only have 60 seconds to play each round, followed by 60 seconds for the judge to pick a winner. It’s great if you have a block of uninterrupted time to play a quick game, but can be frustrating when other players move slowly or drop out of games. Each game starts with five players, but since you need at least three people to play, you get a refund if too many people drop out. You can choose whether you want a Smart, Silly, or Random game, but of course this is self-selected and doesn’t guarantee that the other players will actually play smart answers. Dick jokes pretty much always win, which can be frustrating when you come up with a particularly clever response that goes unrecognized. (Nothing wrong with a good dick joke, but they can get rather banal.) The chat feature can also get annoying; most people are courteous enough not to start conversations with random strangers (and you can report players who get abusive), but every once in a while you’ll get into a game with someone who starts complaining every time someone takes more than 10 seconds to pick a card. Fortunately I’ve only gotten into one game with an asshole who used the feature that lets you make up your own responses to make vaguely racist remarks about another player based on her profile pic.
Playing with friends is more fun because you’re more likely to have shared jokes. However, the lack of a time limit means games can drag out for days. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to how many games you can join at once, so it’s nice to be able to have several games running to minimize the gaps in overall gameplay. (While I usually hate having notifications turned on, they really come in handy so you don’t have a bunch of your friends fuming because you didn’t realize they were waiting on you to start a new round or judge their responses.)
Evil Apples is a free download for for Apple and Android devices. You can easily play without ever spending any money if you have the patience to slowly accrue coins and cakes, or purchase them in the game shop so you don’t have to wait to buy bonus card decks, write your own responses, or discard cards you don’t like. You can also buy various power-ups to remove ads, play unlimited random games, and more. It’s an independent game, so sometimes it can get a bit buggy, but they seem to do a pretty good job of squashing them. The Facebook login used to be really glitchy, but it looks like they’ve cleared that up so you can easily figure out which of your friends have the game. It’s nice that you can start games by inviting friends within the app or by posting a link on your Facebook page or private message. The expansion decks are pretty fun; I love the 90s and Game of Thrones ones, and they sometimes have contests on their Twitter to make new packs. All in all, the fun outweighs any technical issues, and I love it.
What are you waiting for? Go download it and let’s start playing!
