Exploding Kittens Original Edition, 2-5 Players, Ages 7+ Card Game | Draw cards, betray your friends, don't explode

Product overview

Exploding Kittens Original Edition: What to Know

The mechanic this teaches is push-your-luck with a side of interaction, and it does it without anyone being eliminated for long. You draw cards hoping to avoid the Exploding Kitten in the deck, and you hold action cards that let you skip your turn, shuffle the deck, peek at what is coming, or force the next player to draw twice. That last category is the important one developmentally: it is the first time many children play a card because of what it does to somebody else.

The design keeps that from turning nasty. Rounds are short, the humour is the point, and the 56 cards carry cartoons by The Oatmeal featuring characters like Tacocat and Rainbow-Ralphing Cat, which is a large part of why children request it. The publisher notes it came from one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever, and the gameplay is deliberately simple enough that a seven-year-old is not at a disadvantage against an adult.

Practically, it is the most portable game in this guide. The publisher specifically calls it compact for travel and names camping, road trips and game nights, and a deck of cards in a small box is genuinely different from a board game when you are packing.

Two honest limits. At 2 to 5 players it does not scale to a party, and with exactly two players the bluffing thins out considerably since there is only one other person to target. And there is a very large family of Exploding Kittens products, including Recipes for Disaster, party packs, NSFW editions and standalone spin-offs, so check that you are ordering the Original Edition rather than an expansion that may need a base deck.

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