Exploding Kittens

At first I was a bit skeptical about this game. It seemed too simple but I gave it a shot with hopes that it would be more than just a simple game of Russian Roulette but with cards.

This game is absolutely a lot of fun!! BUT you need to play it with the maximum group. If you are playing with one deck, then 4 to 5 players. But if you want even more fun, combine 2 decks or the regular deck with the NSFW for 8 to 10 players and this game will be a riot.

First of all, the artwork is hilarious so that will get a good laugh. Also, the game is super easy to learn. They weren’t kidding when they said that it takes a few minutes to learn because it really does. After that, it is fast paced fun. The trick is not to keep on doing actions. A lot of noobs, think that just because doing actions is part of what you do during your turn, that slows down the game. What you want to do instead is keep on picking up cards to build up your hand and then only play action cards when necessary. That helps keep the game fast paced and then as the deck gets lower and lower, it truly does get more and more intense as players start exploding.

You don’t have to be an avid gamer to enjoy this. All you gotta do is have an open mind and you don’t really have to put too much thought into this. I love all types of games from heavy strategy to simple card games with take that elements. While people may think that it is all luck, I disagree. It is a combination of luck and strategy and if you play your cards right, you can dominate.

I highly recommend it!!! Give it a shot!!

Exploding Kittens is a party game touted as a “kitty powered version of Russian roulette.” It was originally proposed as a Kickstarter project seeking crowd funding of $10,000 USD. It exceeded this goal in only eight minutes. On the campaign’s seventh day, it surpassed 106,000 backers, thus setting the record for having the most backers in the history of Kickstarter. The campaign ended on 19 February 2015 with $8,782,571 USD in pledges by 219,382 backers! Exploding Kittens began shipping to backers in July 2015. Backers received the game in a specially designed box that “meows” when opened.

The success of the Kickstarter project was aided by the social media campaign mounted by the game’s designers. Additionally, the designers encouraged backers to participate in the process by unlocking achievements in various “categories” such as: 25 pics of a beardcat, 25 pics of a potatocat, 10, 50 and 100 people wearing cat ears, ten batmen in one hot tub, five spidermen in a kayak and five YouTube videos of songs about exploding kittens.

The game consists of 56 full colour matte cards of nine different types:

Exploding Kitten – the player that draws this card looses, unless they have a defuse card;
Defuse – defuses the exploding kitten and allows the player to continue play;
Skip – player skips their turn and does not have to draw a card;
Attack – player ends their turn without drawing a card and the next player must take two turns;
See the Future – player views the top three cards of the deck;
Shuffle – player shuffles the deck;
Favor – another player must give the player card from their hand;
Nope – stops the action of another player – except Exploding Kittens or defuse cards;
Cards with no instructions (pair cards) – must be played in matched pairs and allow player to take a random card from another player’s hand.

Each player is dealt five cards, including a defuse card. Players take turns discarding and drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten card. The discarded cards are shuffled and replayed once the deck has been depleted. If an exploding kitten card is drawn and the player cannot defuse it…BOOM…. he explodes and is out of the game. Fortunately, there are a number of cards that can help you prevent (or delay) exploding. Exploding Kittens has been rather accurately compared to Russian roulette as the elements of chance and risk are high. To add balance to the game, there is always one less exploding kitten in the deck than there are players. If you draw the exploding kitten and are lucky enough to be able to defuse it, you can place the exploding kitten back in the deck wherever you like…including directly on top of the deck for the next player to draw. This gives the game an excellent “take that” component. If you do this under the table, no one knows where you put the card and the tension mounts! The last player left in the game is the winner.

The Exploding Kitten box boasts that the game only take two minutes to learn which is fairly accurate. The games simplicity and silliness make it an excellent party game for groups of up to ten people. Adults can add an element of bawdy humour to the game by adding the NSFW deck (described below). The artwork is the funniest and arguably the best part of the game. Exploding Kittens also makes for a rapid fire diversion between more substantial games.

A Not Suitable for work (NSFW) stand alone edition is also available, the card categories and mechanics of play remain the same in this edition; however, the humour and graphics are much more risqué. The NSFW editions naughty cards, recommended for “people who are into kittens and explosions and **** wizards and sometimes butts,” are definitely not recommended for children! The NSFW deck can be combined with the original deck (or another NSFW deck) to allow for up to ten players. In January 2016, a multiplayer version with content not found in the original game was released on the IOS platform.

Exploding Kittens is only available online from amazon.ca or from The Oatmeal Store (the designer’s venue). The cost is $25.00 CAD each for the original and the NSFW editions. The original game in a limited first edition box can be purchased from The Oatmeal Store for $40.00. this box features a magnetic clasp and an empty space for sleeved cards or another deck of 56 cards. What really makes tis box special is that it actually “meows” when you open it! Additionally, fifty percent of the proceeds for the sale of the fist edition boxes go to cat shelters.

It’s not the most in depth game but for a casual card game that always causes some giggles you can’t go wrong. As already said by many its best described as a cross between Uno and russian roulette….with exploding kittens! The cards are humorous and my kids love reading out their names every time they play, some have now become sayings around the house!!! It’s even pushed Jungle Speed off the shelf for the game to go to after dinner on a saturday night so its gotta be good!

It raised $8,782,571.

A card game about detonating cats raised a stupid amount of money. A stupid amount of money that was a record for Kickstarter.

And it was all for card game about blowing up cats.

So the question is, now that the card game has landed in the hands of its two-hundred-and nineteen thousand, three-hundred and eighty-two backers, has all of that support and money been worth the effort? In other words, is it a good game?

Published by Exploding Kittens, LLC after an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign, Exploding Kittens: A Card Game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats is a designed to be played by two to five players aged seven and over, is very easy to learn, and can be played in about fifteen minutes. It is a tactical game of kitten-fuelled Russian Roulette in which players push their luck in an attempt to avoid detonating cats using kitten distracting things like laser pointers, belly rubs, and catnip sandwiches, whilst trying to stop their rivals doing the same. If a player is faced with with an IEK (Improvised Explosive Kitten), then he can use a ‘Defuse’ card—the aforementioned laser pointers, belly rubs, and catnip sandwiches—to save both himself and the kitten. Or at least, just himself. Otherwise he must accept both the kitten cuteness and the explosion, go boom, and be knocked out of the game. The last, unexploded player wins the game.

Play begins with each player receiving a hand of five cards, including a single Defuse card. On his turn, a player draws card. If this is an Exploding Kitten card, then he must use a Defuse card or be blown up and out of the game. If not, the card goes into his hand and his turn ends.

Before that though, a player is free to play any and as many of the cards from his hand. These have a variety of effects. ‘Attack’ cards force the next player to take your turn and their turn—that is two turns on a row, thus drawing more cards; ‘Skip’ cards ends a player’s turn without having to draw a card; ‘Favour’ cards forces another player to give you a card of their choice; ‘Shuffle’ allows a player to shuffle the Draw Pile; ‘See the Future’ lets a player look at the cards at the top of the draw pile; and ‘Cat’ cards are played in in like pairs or trios or quintet to steal cards from other players or take from the Discard Pile. The effect of any cards played can be blocked by a ‘Nope’ card.

As much as Exploding Kittens is about avoiding IEKs, it is as much about preventing the other players avoiding them. This can be done most obviously by playing ‘Nope’ cards to counter their actions, but ‘Attack’ cards force them to draw more cards and increases their likelihood of drawing ‘Exploding Kitten’ cards, as do ‘Skip’ cards. ‘Favour’ and ‘Cat’ cards reduce the cards a player has and thus the number of actions he can take on his turn or his ability to play Defuse cards.

This reduction of a rival’s options becomes ever more critical as the game progresses and the Draw Pile is reduced and the likelihood of an ‘Exploding Kitten’ card being drawn increases. Here the use of the ‘See the Future’ and ‘Shuffle’ cards come into their own because they allow a player some degree of control over the Draw Pile in manipulating the Draw Pile in their favour.

Physically, Exploding Kittens is vibrantly produced. Everything is in full colour and comes in a box that is both sturdy and amusing*. Similarly, the game’s cards are silly and amusing. For example, ‘Deploy the thousand-year back hair’ and ‘Attack of the Bear-o-dactyl’ (Attack cards); ‘Rub Peanut Butter on your Belly Button and make some New Friends’ and ‘Ask for a Back Hair Shampoo’ (Favour cards); ‘Feast upon the unicorn enchilada and gain its enchilada powers’ and ‘Deploy the Special-Ops Bunnies’ (See the Future cards); ‘A Plague of Bat ***** Descends from the Sky’ and ‘An Electromagnetic Pomeranian Rolls in from the East’ (Shuffle cards); ‘Don the portable cheetah butt’ and ‘Commandeer a Bunnyraptor’ (Skip cards); ‘Feed your opponent a Nope Sandwich with Extra Nopesauce’ and ‘A Jackanope Bounds into the Room’ (Nope cards); and ‘Cattermelon’ and ‘Beard Cat’ (Cat cards).

*Note that your cats may not necessarily agree about how amusing this actually is.

So gameplay is simple, even simplistic. Which begs the question, what is the appeal of Exploding Kittens? Part of the game’s attraction is the fact that it is illustrated by The Oatmeal, the comic and blog artist for the eponymously named website. The artwork for the game’s cards is silly, funny, even nonsensical, and there is no doubt that it will make you laugh out loud. The game’s title, let alone its full title—Exploding Kittens: A Card Game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats—should be enough to indicate that.

Yet is Exploding Kittens a good game?

For the gamer, it is not. Exploding Kittens is too light, lacks substance, and its ‘knock out’ mechanic will leave players with nothing to do but watch. For a family audience, its weird humour may be too odd for some and its adult expansion—Exploding Kittens: A Card Game for People who are into Kittens and Explosions and **** Wizards and sometimes Butts—is definitely not suited to a family audience. Well, it does carry the minimum age of thirty plus… For the casual player, Exploding Kittens will be a much more appealing prospect as the very light and silly diversion that is.