Thoughts on… Exploding Kittens
What? You have a kitten!? Let me see! Oh my god! Oh my God! Oh my God! He’s so cute! Wait, what’s he doing with those matches… And that TNT…? Run! Oh God. Everybody run!
Meow?
That is pretty much the response you should have to Exploding Kittens, board gaming’s most successful card game, at least as far as Kickstarter is concerned, earning $8.7 million dollars on the website last year. That is, quite frankly, an insane amount of money in this industry, and the game doesn’t even come with miniatures!
What you do get is a very nice box containing very nice cards covered with fantastic artwork courtesy of Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal fame. I am a big fan of The Oatmeal, so I very much enjoyed looking over the, admittedly disturbing, artwork. There is a multitude of cats; my particular favourite being Taco Cat (it’s a palindrome!), and a host of individually illustrated special power cards. The Exploding Kittens for which the game is named are especially nice, featuring a two-part comic strip of “kitten doing something stupid” followed by “big explosion”. As a luxurious extra, the box meows when it opens! When I played the game we had our very own exploding kitten bouncing around the room who was very shocked by the meowing box.
Unfortunately not everything that glitters is gold and the game itself has issues. In a simple system you can play any number of cards, and then you must draw one card from the deck. If that card is an Exploding Kitten, and you don’t have a defuse card in your hand, then you are out of the game. On the surface this should make drawing each card incredibly tense, but it in fact has the opposite effect. There is nothing you can do about it.
You can try and describe this game as Russian Roulette with kittens, but the reason Russian Roulette is such a tense game to play is that you have a vested interest in your life continuing, and your reaching this point is a culmination of the choices you have made. The “any of the next 2 cards could kill us” mechanism is what makes the Matt Leacock co-ops Pandemic, Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert so nerve-rackingly amazing. It works there because it is through your actions as players that you have reached this point. Often it was a conscious decision to leave New York on the brink of an outbreak, say. You chose to take a risk, and then you bite your nails until you know that risk has paid off, or not.
Exploding Kittens doesn’t let you make this choice. It doesn’t give you the opportunity to risk losing everything or to just play it safe. And because you don’t have that choice, you don’t have that emotional payoff for succeeding or failing. You just don’t have a sense of agency in the game.
Now, that’s not to say there are no good choices to make. Indeed, when I played the same player regularly won, so there does seem to be an element of skill. You can certainly use your card abilities wisely: skipping turns, stealing from opponents or looking at upcoming cards in the deck are more effective at certain points than at others. There are also immensely entertaining streaks of schadenfreude when everyone is one-upping each other in a flurry of cards. But that is not the dominant part of the game.
There are even flashes of brilliance. When you hit an Exploding Kitten, it is returned to the deck, intensifying the threat. And in a genius rule, everyone else must look away and you choose where in the deck the kitten goes. Suddenly the tension is there, and everyone is playing guessing games. Is it just on top? Who are they targeting? Just how well do you know that player? Everyone will start desperately playing their best cards. It’s masterful! Until someone plays a “shuffle the deck” card and that tension leaks out of the game like a slowly deflating balloon. You can almost hear the weak latex-y squeak.
I cannot recommend Exploding Kittens. Aside from some brief flashes of tension, the overwhelming feeling that comes from this game is tedium. If you enjoy reading The Oatmeal then you’ll love the card art, but that source of entertainment will inevitably grow stale (except Taco Cat, of course). There is player elimination from the start, yet the game can drag out leaving players sitting around. And eventually the game ends when someone draws a card at random. “Oh, I lost” they’ll say. Out, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Leave a Reply