My friends are playing Exploding Kittens for the first time. Tension heightens as one person draws a card, praying it doesn’t spell out his doom.
The turn passes, and the next player snorts. She has played a card titled, “See the Future – Crawl inside a goat butt and see many wondrous things.”
“Denied!” says the next player, brandishing a card that reads, “The Pope of Nope has spoken,” and the tension breaks completely. The entire table erupts in a spontaneous giggle fit.
Simple rules, funny art and a record-breaking Kickstarter—even before Exploding Kittens was delivered, I figured it had to be good. Testing it out with a group of my eight closest friends, I found this game to be simple to learn, but strong enough to engage everyone until the end.
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First Look
It was my husband’s idea to back the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter. I was more hesitant. We’ve both been burned by Kickstarters before—fronting the money and then waiting months and months past the delivery date to see anything (or even worse, never seeing anything at all).
However, it soon became clear that Exploding Kittens was no ordinary Kickstarter. It’s currently the most-funded game in Kickstarter history, and then the most backed Kickstarter, period. Knowing so many people were betting on this made me feel safer. The miniscule $35 investment—for both the regular deck and NSFW edition—made it even less risky.
Our risk paid off and our shipment was delivered in July as promised. We decided to hold onto it until our annual vacation with our friends to Lake Anna, a rural part of Virginia where one friend has a lakefront cabin. In between boating and s’mores, we wanted to bring games that were good for big groups, quick and easy to learn.
Setup
My husband spends less time on the Internet than I do, so I was surprised he was so excited to play this game. “I didn’t know you’d even heard of The Oatmeal,” I said, referring to the quirky cartoonist who illustrated each of the Exploding Kittens cards.
He hadn’t, he told me, but he was drawn in by the way the game looked funny, simple and fast. “A big problem with games is they take a long time to learn and a long time to play, and with a big group not everybody has the attention span for that,” he said.
Everyone knows the worst part of any board game is figuring out how to play it for the first time. But with Exploding Kittens, we didn’t even have to explain. Simply show the four-minute video tutorial to any newcomer, and they’re instantly up to speed. It helps that Exploding Kittens is already a ridiculously simple concept—think Russian Roulette but with kitten bombs. Players attempt to either defuse the kittens, or avoid drawing kitten cards altogether. That’s it, really.
Frequently when my friends play a new game—especially when there are nine of us trying it out, the explanation takes forever, and gives way to lots of questions during gameplay, too. This time, my friends latched onto almost intuitively. The hardest part is figuring out how to shuffle the deck and pass out cards, which means only the dealer (in this case my husband) has to really know the game in advance.
Gameplay
It’s hard to get nine people to all focus on one thing without checking their phones, but Exploding Kittens was fast and exciting enough to do the trick. Any turn you take could be your last, because anyone can draw an exploding kitten card at any time. And since the player ahead of you might shuffle or manipulate the deck, you need to always be on your guard.
You’re probably wondering how we managed to play Exploding Kittens with nine people when it only supports 2 to 5. That’s where the NSFW deck comes in. By combining the regular and NSFW editions into one deck, we doubled the allowed player count. Full of boob and butt jokes, the NSFW deck isn’t something I’d play with my parents, but it’s a far and harmless cry from what, for example, Cards Against Humanity defines as NSFW.
Even with nine people, each game took about fifteen minutes to complete, confirming its status as an extremely rapidfire diversion in between other games or activities.
Verdict: Fleeting and Fun
The first playthrough lasted until there were just two cards left in the deck. The last player standing (coincidentally, also that same first player who crawled up a goat butt) decided to shuffle, knowing he had a 50-50 chance of drawing an innocuous card or the exploding kitten that would mean his defeat.
Miraculously, he drew the safe card, and the table exploded into cheers. Even though the rest of us had already fallen victim to the kittens, it felt like a group victory against the deck.
Our only issue with the game is that when it was delivered, one card was cut incorrectly and therefore, unplayable—anyone would know by its jagged edges which card it was. We contacted the Exploding Kittens team, heard back from them within 24 hours, and our new card is reportedly on its way as I write this.
Overall, the game is a hit with my friends, which makes me feel like I chose it wisely. Even when we grow tired of the cards’ jokes about goat butts and smoking crack with baby owls, the high-stakes gameplay remains. So after the against-the-odds victory playthrough, we caught our breaths. And then we did the only smart thing: we played again.
