Game Review: Exploding Kittens

I think anyone reading this is probably familiar with The Oatmeal (note: that website is surprisingly not blocked at my office). Well there was a Kickstarter campaign for a game called Exploding Kittens with artwork done by Matthew Inman. To say it was successful is an understatement. The campaign raised $8.8M and broke records. About two weeks ago my copy finally arrived, actually on schedule which is a Herculean task for most Kickstarters. So how does it play?

It's actually pretty fun, although with only two or three players it can get very one-sided. Play works like this: each turn you can play as many cars as you want, then you end your turn by drawing a card from the deck. If you draw an Exploding Kitten, you're out unless you can play a Defuse card. There are a number of Exploding Kittens in the deck equal to the number of players minus one. If you Defuse the kitten you discard the Defuse and put the Exploding Kitten back into the deck wherever you want.

There's other cards, like Skip which ends your turn without drawing a card; See the Future, which lets you look at, but not change the order of, the top three cards in the deck; Favor which makes a player give you a card of their choice from their hand; Attack which ends your turn without drawing a card but the next player takes TWO turns; and Nope which cancels any card except and Exploding Kitten or Defuse.

There's a little more to the rules, but you get the idea. You can watch a video here. The game plays pretty quick one you know what the cards do and games last about 20 minutes usually. The art and card flavor text is hilarious, so first time players will take more time as they read their cards and laugh. If you share my sense of humor (and if you're reading this you probably do) there's a deck full of NSFW cards. Same game, same function, just more dick and fart jokes.

I picked up the game via Kickstarter. I got the combo deal which came with both the regular and NSFW deck. I haven't used the regular deck a single time. The Kickstarter bonus included a high quality box with a magnetic lid and a special surprise. the box is also big enough to hold both decks.

Overall I'm really happy with this one. Great bonuses from Kickstarter without making it feel like you need them to really play the game. If you can find it in a store, I highly recommend it.