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Exploding Kittens is a card game claiming to be “a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette.” Until I started this review, I was going to file Exploding Kittens under Tier Two – not bad, but not anything there to keep you entertained past an hour or so. After reading that elevator pitch, I am inspired to write a bit more. The premise of the game is pretty simple: draw cards until all but one player has drawn an Exploding Kitten with no Defuse card to stop it. Everyone starts with one Defuse card, and there are chances to draw or steal more Defusal cards. There is very little content beyond just that description, even with the advanced rule options.
If you want an easily accessible and competitive card game, it should have simple rules (that is, a good core gameplay loop/turn structure) that include interactions with other players, which are then changed and subverted by the cards you draw within the game. I would even argue that the latter part is the case for any marketed and packaged card game – if your cards aren’t there to change and subvert the rules, you should just be playing with a standard deck of cards. If your rules don’t have you directly interacting with the other players, you should just be playing Solitaire. Competitive card games for parties have to balance these requirements so there is a more even distribution of wins, even when one person is far more familiar with the rules. The only way to accomplish this is by making the results more random – and quite often, making the game too non-deterministic. A great example of this is the item system in Mario Kart – it rewards failure and punishes success. Nothing typifies this better than the Blue Shell – an item you can only get in last place – which temporarily stops the player in first place. The worst player can sometimes rocket (literally) from 8th to 1st – and vice versa – with no interaction. In my opinion, Exploding Kittens falls too much on this side of things.
In Exploding Kittens, the cards do precious little to change the rules. The entire game boils down to: have more Defusals and/or better luck, win the game. While there are a few good interactions among the five or six types of action cards, much of the deck is filled with action-less cards which can only be used in pairs in standard rules (to get a random card from another player). You are entirely reliant on luck to draw these, and while doing so might be annoying for the other player, only getting a Defusal actually matters.
While fancy art or clever jokes on a card might be interesting or funny the first time you see it, they all eventually become faceless resources (even with art from The Oatmeal). In this process, too many of the cards in Exploding Kittens become blank pieces of cardboard or ones with only situational actions. This isn’t a bad party game per se, but it is a falsely marketed one – there is no high strategy involved in a game of Russian Roulette, and there is precious little more in a game of Exploding Kittens. Depending on the quantity of cards included, it looks like Imploding Kittens may make these problems less noticeable by altering the balance of action and non-action cards, but I have not played that variant.