Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 12:31 am
Exploding Kittens® – Board Game Review
Exploding Kittens® is a Board/Card/Entertainment game from Marmalade Game Studio Limited, first launched in 21st January 2016.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 11,543+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Exploding Kittens® Stand Out
Play the most-funded game in Kickstarter history anywhere with the Exploding Kittens® Official mobile game!
The mobile version of the game is available now, including the Party Pack, Betrayal, Streaking Kittens, and the all new Barking Kittens expansion! Play with friends or strangers in online play, challenge the AI, or play offline with friends face-to-face!
In this highly-strategic, kitty-powered card game, players draw cards until someone draws an Exploding Kitten, at which point they are out of the game — unless that player has a Defuse card, which can defuse the Kitten using things like laser pointers, belly rubs and catnip sandwiches. All of the other cards in the deck are used to move, mitigate or avoid the Exploding Kittens.
KEY FEATURES:
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Exploding Kittens is a multiplayer card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.
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Play with 2 to 5 players across multiple phones in the same room, or online with friends or strangers
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Featuring original art by The Oatmeal
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New cards exclusive to the digital version of Exploding Kittens
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Digital versions of the hit expansions, including Streaking and Barking Kittens, as well as digital exclusive Betrayal and Party decks
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The digital version of the most backed game in Kickstarter history
Created by Elan Lee (Xbox, ARGs), Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), and Shane Small (Xbox, Marvel).
Exploding Kittens is a paid app in which optional game features may be purchased with real money. You must be at least 13 years old to download and play. There is also an option to compete online against strangers and resulting data transfer charges may apply. Player usernames and expressions are their own. Exploding Kittens, LLC is not responsible for and does not endorse player usernames or expressions. For our privacy policy, visit www.explodingkittens.com/privacy.
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Exploding Kittens® is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 20th August 2024
Recent improvements include:
Bugfixing and Stability improvements
Download & Availability
Exploding Kittens® is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Exploding Kittens® on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Just bought this game, and when we try to play online all we get is a message of Oops We are full now, Please try again later. We feel like we got ripped off. UPDATE: seems to be working better now, but was unplayable for 3 to 4 days. There are still bugs like a weird message when you open the game, and your name is set by the game rather than your choice. Changing to 3 stars as it can be fun but buggy.
This game is a waste of money bc we bought the party pack and theirs no one plying that mode.
It used to be that Id be able to invite our girlfriend to play with us in Public Servers, but thats no longer an option :/ We have to kind of queue up at the same time and hope we can play together in a public match :(.
This game is accurate to real life.
We can literally just play exploding kittens wherever we want (even when our family doesnt want to play the actual cards) its amazing. And we kinda hope we see godcat and devilcat as profile pictures that would be amazing.
The friend code things doesnt work. We were excited to play with our boyfriend but now we cant. Very unfortunate.
Its a great game, but change the name of single player mode! We dont want to click Play with yourself to play solo.
We absolutely love exploding kittens! We play it with family online and with the actual cards. We love the barking kittens and streaking kittens packs, theyre lots of fun! Sometimes we like to play online with the normal deck and then rematch and change the pack to a non free one so that others can play it as well. And its often an easy win cause they are new to the pack we have been playing it for a while now and its definitely worth it! To anyone considering we definitely recommend! That said, theres a bug Ive been having regarding the hardest bot on single player. We have 21 wins against it and we still havent unlocked the skin! We payed for the other skins (Jesus, Marie curie, Shark, etc.) and unlocked the other two bot skins. We were excited to get it but still havent. All in all its a great game, and we have a lot of fun playing. Thanks for reading, have a great day.
We think this is not too hard but not too easy and it is a great game except for the part you have to pay for other card packs! It is so much fun and it makes us want to play all day.
The game will often suggest that we try a different expansion pack, but theres no one ever in the lobby of the expansion pack. Maybe if there are enough people who have bought the expansion pack in normal lobbies, they could have the ability to change the expansion pack for everyone.
No complaints, but we have a cool idea. Add an upgrade card that gives the ability to improve cards (put these in the description of the card) like for example the shuffle will not have a kitten on the top (unless all cards are kittens) and have two servers per variant, one with upgrade cards and one without. Also, we want to see how many people are waiting for a game for convenience.
Great game. Please review the shuffle card. Theres no way it is working correctly.
So we loved exploding kittens our friend showed us the app and we got it but when we tried to buy a skin set it was not loading please get this app.
We love this game. Love the app. Kitty Letter is fire too. You guys are doing an amazing job Can we get stats on Kittens please.
This is a very great game! We love to play it! But we have some suggestions. 1. Add the imploding kittens expansion, its the only real life expansion that isnt in the game. We know most cards in the expansion are already in the game but you could add some new ones. 2. Make it so you can use the KITT-E and clawborg 3000 backgrounds in public games, maybe some new ones as well. 3. You for some reason cant play a bury card when you have an ill take that effect on you. Im assuming this is a bug.
We love the card game, and the app. This is sooo good. We love it.
We got this game 2 weeks ago, been playing it almost every day lol. We love it all, its the best and only cat card game youll find out there and is truly unique is offers a fair experience for players that dont want to buy card packs. Since ive loved this game for a while now we might buy some stuff. We like it better than Uno, dont even play uno a lot anymore lol. Good job developers, like too see more :)).
Playing a "Steal a card" while someone "we'll take that"'s you crashes the app.
So we have this on iPad 10 and we try buying the streaking kittens pack please reply! Pls. Never mind it worked n.
Really good game, very similar to the card game. Only one recommendation: two player one the same phone.
Good game. Missed opportunities. EVERY game has stats to look at and compare with friends. Please add win/loss at least. Get creative! Also, please add the trade cat cards in for a steal and trade 5 cards in for a draw out of the discard pile. Big miss there. Maybe make the leave game button accessible after a loss so we can actually leave the game. Overall its missing a lot of the original game but for the price, cant miss this one.
Very fun every now and then it closes the game for now reason/ the game crashes.
This game is really good but hear us out, we have a big recommendation. This mobile game has a setup thats perfect for Apple TV. You could just scroll through your different cards and and itll move up to show what you have selected and you can hit the main button to play the card and itll also show you the description before hitting enter, highlighting the draw card and clicking would draw a card and pause game could be play/pause button. We hope this idea gets implemented! Really good job.
For Exploding Kittens fans, this game is a must! (Its far better than the version for Netflix subscribers). Its a nice twist on the card game, but with all the features that make the original so addictive. We love the sounds and graphics. The only reason this is a 4-star game and not 5 is that way too often the app will glitch or crash, disconnecting right in the middle of a game. Too often Ive been about to make an exciting move or been on the verge of a win, when the app crashes and loses our game. You can tell it happens to others too since quite often your opponents will just disappear mid-game, even when theyre winning. If they can fix the glitch, this would be an easy 5-stars. As is though, we highly recommend downloading this.
We love this game physically and really love being able to play this game whenever we feel like it. One thing though is that Ill be mid game and either winning or in a good spot and suddenly we get booted out of the game and this keeps happening so please fix this devs we really enjoy the game but when this happens it makes us angry and not want to play the game anymore.
Great game! Caught one bug where, if you make a private game public, you must wait in the room indefinitely until someone joins (or leaves and rejoins).
Good game but it features the packs but you have to pay for it but otherwise a really good game.
What would make it better is to have it be possible to be sorted into a type of game at random. Its hard to get a group together for the less popular decks.
Theres so much cheating in the barking kittens pack its no longer fun to play. Not sure why the developers are not fixing this problem. Also the app glitches a lot and will shut down randomly and especially when Im close to winning! But the game is fun and addictive.
The game works but we cannot purchase new decks. It doesnt allow any options to do so.
Great game but needs pass and play.
The Netflix version has updated UI as well as background music. This version doesnt even scale properly to fullscreen :/.
There is a glitch in the barking kittens expansion that allows players to cheat. Its not fun to play anymore.
Fun game. But when you click to buy a card pack, nothing happens.
This game needs to tweak the algorithms our 1st grader memorized the distribution with in mins of playing. And figured out that the host will always lose. So there should be a way to play privately with each other in a public match. They should also let you sample additional packs and rules.
When we were playing a game we decided to buy a deck but it wasnt working. We click on the button and it wasnt working. Our mom tried on her Sam song and he didnt work eater fix this please sorry we have nail.
We have played this game a lot for about 2 years and love it. However, there are some bugs: not getting connected, getting disconnected and what appears to be cheating. Most annoyingly, the entire app has been increasingly crashing in the last month.
We paid for the game because we thought it might be fun to play in some down time and because we had a code for some neato in game content. Unfortunately it appears that the place to type in the codes for this neato content has been removed. Not sure how we feel about spending money on a game partly due to a content offer that isnt even usable.
Love this game but needs quite a few fixes.
This is overall a fun game. However, there have been multiple times the games cheats in the single player, medium or hard mode. The cheat is when there is an exploding kitten and the game itself refuses to take its move and draw the exploding kitten. The game will continuously have the opponent play until the opponent draws the exploding kitten.
Although ingenious in design, and with a potential for charming gameplay, some distinct drawbacks plague this app. The multiplayer environment has become awash with extremely aggressive players. While not the developers fault, they have nonetheless allowed the problem to worsen. Players cannot disable haptics, so nagging seems to be perpetual, and limitless. This detracts mightily from the appeal of the multiplayer experience. The servers rarely provide a full table of players for the premium content. Single player mode provides a weakly-imagined AI deployed with somewhat unabashed Blue Turtle Shell logic. The AI plays the best card even when blinded with implausible regularity. This makes winning more a function of luck than skill. With no stats other than win/loss, the single player game feels watery already, and the lack of AI multiplayer channels this sensation into a canal of low-stakes confrontation. There are many good points to this game, and the IRL version is brilliant, but quality-of-experience has declined and should be addressed.
It crashes all the time. Fix the bug already.
While we really enjoy this game and believe $1.99 to be a great one-time price, we dont get to play it nearly as often as Id like due to the Welcome Message not going away despite us clicking the X in its corner. Waste of time.
It seems to us the AI (especially the hard AI) often cheats. If you play a slap card, for example, or a double slap card, the AI seems to ignore it and slap you back where you have to take multiple turns. We have beat the hard AI, but the way that bot plays especially makes it all luck and no fun. And the other two bots are too easy. So we deleted the game. Probably better with real cards in person.
Perhaps it has something to do with Stage Manager.
Butt when you buy cards there are no multi players to play with. It is like we got penalized for helping out the developers. We like the new cards but are no good if no one will play with us. Stick to free game till you get board of the cards we guess. That makes it worth two stars.
Would not recommend purchasing additional decks. You will have to wait for at least 15-20 minutes to get any players.
Yall need to fix the technical glitches in this game.
Clearly designed by sadists. You get a code, you minimize the app to send the code to your friend, you go back to the app and it tells you it lost connection (because you minimized it) and you have to get another code. Its absurd.
If youre trying to play a local game/ private match, every player needs to buy the app. This version is butt. Get the Exploding kittens Netflix version that is free and everyone can join.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.3.10
- Size: 273.17 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
- Developer: Marmalade Game Studio Limited
Last updated: 20th August 2024 | Genre: Board, Card | Developer: Marmalade Game Studio Limited