The card for skipping a turn says, “take a nap instead,” and it shows a napping cat. I laughed just looking through the cards that I received in the very first hand. The game has an uproarious sense of humor. Every card you draw increases your odds of drawing the exploding kitten, making things more tense as a match progresses.

You have to decide which cards to play, when to play them, and which of your opponents to target. You can deploy the thousand-year back hair, peek at cards by rubbing the belly of a pig-a-corn, skip a turn by wearing a portable cheetah butt, or seek out the wisdom of a goat wizard. Action cards do things like remove or mitigate the kittens. You can also deploy a tacocat, Abracrab Lincoln, magical meat bikini, and a catterwocky. You take turns drawing cards, and if you draw the “exploding kitten” card, you are out - unless that player has a “defuse” card that can neutralize the kittens with laser pointers, kitten therapy, and catnip sandwiches. In the table edition, you put the deck of cards face down.

The app is built in Unity, and it uses art from The Oatmeal. The digital experience has new cards that the paper one doesn’t, and it has sound effects. Two to five players can play it as a multiplayer title, but they have to be in the same room. Its creators are Elan Lee, the creator of Edoc Laundry Matt Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal online comic and Shane Small, the former principal art director at Xbox Entertainment Studios. The game’s zaniness, the Oatmeal’s involvement, and its viral status on social media helped propel it into the stratosphere.įor the mobile release, the Exploding Kittens founders teamed up with Seattle-based digital product studio Substantial to create an iOS app that would not just replicate the original game but evolve and improve it for old and new fans alike. It’s a disappointment because the tabletop card game was the most funded game in Kickstarter history, raising more than $8 million from 219,382 contributors.

Blind as a bat exploding kittens