Of course, these strategies will all be used against you too, which is where the Nope card comes in handy. While drawing a card from the pile is always fraught, getting one from an opponent is great because there’s no way it’s an Exploding Kitten-and you might end up with a coveted Defuse card. You can use a Favor card to force an opponent to give you one of their cards (of their choice), or a matching pair of Cat cards to steal a random card from an opponent. Maybe you’ll play a Skip card, an Attack card to force an opponent to deal with it, or a Shuffle card to get it back further down the deck. If you have a See the Future card, you can take a peek at the top three cards in the deck to see if it’s there, then play another card to avoid it. Think the Kitten card is lurking? Play the Skip card if you have it, and you won’t have to draw a card to end your turn. Most people attracted to this game will love the ridiculous drawings of bats farting or cats shaped like hairy potatoes. Why is taking two turns a bad thing? Because you’ll have to draw two cards, and you never know if the Exploding Kitten will be one of them. There are six other types of cards, including an Attack card, which lets you immediately end your turn and force the next player to take two turns in a row. If you think it through carefully, you might be able to knock the next opponent out. You only get to play it once, but you’ll stay alive and you get to put the Exploding Kitten card back in the deck wherever you want. Every player gets one Defuse card, which counteracts the Exploding Kitten card. This is done with the use of the other cards in the deck.

That’s where the strategy comes in: You want to lower your odds of drawing the dreaded card by increasing the odds that your opponents will. But to stay in the game, you can try to use all the other cards to your advantage. And since you can’t end your turn until you draw a card, the threat is always there. The whole point of Exploding Kittens is to not draw an Exploding Kitten card. The Spruce / Danielle Centoni How it Works: Try not to draw the wrong card

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Exploding kittens board game