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Exploding Kittens (iOS) game review

Exploding Kittens game review for iPhone: We play the iOS version of this popular card game, which combines fluffy kitties with extreme violence.

Chances are you’ve heard of Exploding Kittens even if you’ve never played it. This off-kilter card game was one of the most-funded Kickstarter projects ever, hitting its goal of $10,000 US in under ten minutes, and now it’s set to blow up the App Store as it’s just come out for iPhone.

The concept for Exploding Kittens is blissfully simple, as with most card games. There’s a deck of cards and each player (between two to five at one time) takes it in turns to draw a card, until someone draws an Exploding Kitten card. That player is then out of the game, unless they happen to have a Defuse card in their personal pile. The Exploding Kitten returns to the pile and gameplay continues until just one survivor remains.

Of course, there are plenty of bizarre and hilarious cards that you can draw to sabotage the game. For instance, the Cat Butt card hides all of your chosen victim’s cards from view, replacing them with fuzzy sphincters. The Mantis Shrimp card allows you to see which cards are coming next, while the Slap cards force another player to draw instead.

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We’ve seen card games similar to this before, but Exploding Kittens is joyously bonkers and elevated by the hilarious card sketches and ridiculous sound effects. Screwing over your mates with a cat diarrhea dump has never been more fun.

Annoyingly you can only play Exploding Kittens in local multiplayer for now, so you can’t compete against distant friends; only those in the same WiFi network as you. We had no trouble setting up our local games (one player hosts and the others join) and it worked perfectly throughout, with zero latency, but here’s hoping the developers sort out a proper internet multiplayer mode for the first update. There’s not even a single-player mode where you compete against an AI opponent, to hone your skills when there’s no one else to play with.

Our only other complaint is that as soon as the host explodes out of the game, that’s the game over for everyone, for some inexplicable reason. But if you’re blasted out and you’re merely a guest, the other players can continue to play (and dead gamers can simply spectate). It’s a bizarre and annoying ‘feature’ that will hopefully be fixed soon.

You can buy Exploding Kittens for your iPhone right now, via Apple’s App Store, for £1.49. And as a special introductory bonus, the Party Pack in-app purchase (which adds four new cards to your deck) and extra avatars are all free for a limited time, so grab it fast if you’re interested.

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