Exploding Kittens: The Board Game Review
Exploding Kittens has never been a game I particularly enjoyed, and honestly after playing this board game adaptation, I could take it or leave it. My kids, however, absolutely love Exploding Kittens, and all the spinoffs like Exploding Minions. Watching them enjoy Exploding Kittens: The Board Game has been really fun, and while it’s not for me, it is definitely for them.
Exploding Kittens: The Board Game feels incredibly familiar when you play, despite a completely different end-game goal. In the card game, you want to eliminate the other players; in the board game, you want to be the first to get to the end. The core gameplay loop is quite simply: play as many cards from your hand as you want, then draw a move disc and move that many spaces. Where you end up will either give you more cards OR cause you to explode. If you explode, you swap places with whomever is in last place, and discard down to three cards.
In Exploding Kittens: The Board Game, you are never out of it.
If you’ve played Exploding Kittens, then you probably understand the cards included in the game pretty well. Playing matching cat cards will allow you to steal a card form another players, playing a NOPE card will stop another player from performing an action, and so on. There are a few new cards that will force the book to flip – more on that soon – add bad cards to the move disc deck, and more. The board game, like the card game, is all about card management and deck building. The concepts are similar, the end goal is different.
The gimmick in the board game is that the game board actually turns pages to reveal an entirely new configuration. One board is more cat friendly, with lots of safe spaces; the other side is a much more dangerous side, with tons of exploding spaces. A good player will move on the good side, but force their opponents to move on the bad side. Fighting it out and flipping the book is way more fun than it deserves to be, and I love that.
Like the card game, the board game is something you cannot take too seriously. While there is some strategy in the card play, ultimately the game is heavily luck based. There is nothing wrong with that, and the fast paced play of the game, and the fact that no one is ever eliminated, makes it an ideal experience regardless of how unlucky you might get. If you enjoy the Exploding Kittens card game, I think you’ll enjoy this too.
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Article By Adam
