Exploding
Kittens

Exploding Kittens (2015) is a push-your-luck card game like Russian Roulette but with adorable kittens rather than bullets. You take turns drawing cards until you get the Exploding Kitten card and lose. The twist is the various comical and cunning ways you can avoid exploding, like defuse cards or peek cards that let you look through the deck before you draw.

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Play involves taking turns to draw cards from the deck in the middle. If you draw the Exploding Kitten card (and don't have a Defuse card) you are out of the game. The non-exploding cards you draw go into your hand and offer a variety of ways to stack the odds in your favour and help you to dodge explosions.

If you defuse the Exploding Kitten card you can put it back in the deck anywhere you want. This means you can count down a certain number of cards to set up another player, or perhaps put it at the bottom or top. This makes the Defuse cards really powerful and adds lots of strategy to the play.

The other cards further subvert these tactics by offering ways to skip turns, attack other players so they can't go, cancel the action of another player, shuffle the deck and have a peek at the next three cards. As the play progresses and the number of cards in the deck diminishes it becomes more likely to hit the Exploding Kitten card and tensions ramp up.

Along with this, there's a set collecting element where you get to cash in groups of kittens to steal cards from other players. It's all very silly, but a lot of fun and a highly skilled challenge.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Exploding Kittens 23 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 3 weeks ago.