It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Exploding Kittens exploded onto the market. So how do you say Happy Birthday? Well, with a board game! We caught up with the team to find out more about Exploding Kittens: The Board Game
Interview by Charlie Pettit
Happy Birthday, Exploding Kittens! After phenomenal success on Kickstarter, we’ve seen Exploding Kittens in mobile games, regular pop culture, and even on Netflix, so it’s no wonder that they’re celebrating the success of the last ten years in a big way. Thor Ritz, who runs Game Development, and Ian Claymore, a Senior Game Designer at Exploding Kittens, filled us in on what we can expect.
Thor Ritz (TR): The Exploding Kitten Board Game is the newest edition to our core franchise, Exploding Kittens. For the first time ever, we’ve taken key ingredients from the card game and put them into an actual board game. Players are still collecting and playing cards while they try to avoid exploding, but now the goal is to be the first player to make it to the end of the board. In the original card game, you explode by drawing an Exploding Kitten. In the board game, you explode when you land on an Exploding Kitten space. What we think is really exciting is that we didn’t want to just make a board game. So we also made it a pop-up book! The board actually has two states that you can flip between – Calm Mode and Chaos Mode. Chaos Mode has way more Exploding Kitten spaces, so if one of the other players is about to win, you can flip the board to Chaos Mode to try to blow them up.
TR: We knew early on that we didn’t want to just make a board game. So we started brainstorming what mechanics we could add that would make that format more exciting, and we pretty quickly came up with the idea of being able to change the board itself. We played with a bunch of different ways to do that – letting players choose between multiple paths, covering up spaces on the board, etc – but eventually we decided on having two states to keep things simple. And once we started talking about being able to “flip” between those two states, that’s when we realised we could make the board into a pop-up book.
Ian Claymore (IC): So Calm Mode is the state the game starts in, and as the name implies, it’s not too crazy. There are only a few Exploding Kittens spaces along the path, and every other space lets you draw cards when you land on them. But in Chaos Mode there’s way more Exploding Kittens, and even if you do land on a card draw space, you don’t get to draw as many cards as you would if you landed on that same space in Calm Mode.
IC: So there’s lots of cards in the board game that you’ll recognise if you’ve played the original game.
TR: There’s also tons of new ways to sabotage other players that have to do with the board itself. Obviously, the big one is flipping the board into Chaos Mode, but we also have cards that force the player who draws them to move to the next Exploding Kittens space. So if you really want to be mean you can stack the deck with those cards right before someone else’s turn.
IC: I think my favourite is definitely Mega Move. It lets you move twice, and it’s a lot of fun seeing someone rocket from last place into first place… or seeing someone draw two Move 1s and getting completely deflated. Especially since when we were playtesting we got into the habit of chanting “Mega Move! Mega Move!” to build suspense.
TR: My favourite card is “One Small Step,” which allows you to move ahead one space ahead without drawing a Move Disc. This is a sneakily powerful card that I love using at the end of the game to quietly cross the finish line.
TR: I’m going to get a tattoo of our famous character Tacocat.