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Get ready for a wild time with a game that combines adorable kittens with some big explosions!
Exploding Kittens: Recipes for Disaster is the ultimate Exploding Kittens collection, a party game for 2-5 players aged 7 or above that includes wild and remixed versions of the original game that boomed on Kickstarter! Each match should take around 15 minutes to be played and I guarantee you’ll be wanting to replay it many, many times.
“What’s In The Box? What’s In The Box??”
Exploding Kittens: Recipes for Disaster comes with an instruction manual, a field guide, a curated deck of 121 of the most popular cards from multiple Exploding Kittens expansions, 13 recipe books for different game modes (including 2-player only variants), 5 blank recipe cards to create your own recipes and a re-imagined wearable Cone of Shame that looks AMAZING on other players!
All this is neatly packed inside a pretty “neat freak” friendly box that allows you to tidy up all copies of each single card in its respective slot, making it easier to sort out and find the cards you need for the particular recipe you may be using next.
Gameplay
The game itself can be learnt in 5 minutes, making it perfect for a casual gathering with your friends or introducing new people to the hobby, and they resume it perfectly in the rule book: “If you explode, you lose. If you don’t explode, you win. And all the other cards will lessen your chance of getting exploded”. And it really is as easy as that!
With the introduction of the recipes, we get huge replayability value. There are cards from multiple expansions that add different dimensions to the game and it really takes quite a few matches to try out all the different combinations. With this though, comes a slightly bigger setup time, but nothing major. Now during setup, you grab the recipe your group wants to play, pick out the cards on that recipe from all the cards available in the box and prepare the deck and player hands as the recipe advises.
After picking the player who goes first, play proceeds as it usually would on any Exploding Kittens game: On each turn, a player can either play as many cards they’d like face up, resolving their effects, or they may pass and not play any cards. To end their turn, the players must always draw a card from the Draw Pile into their hands and hope they don’t draw an Explosive Kitten. The game ends once every player but one has exploded (or imploded, also an option in this collection!)
Final Thoughts
Exploding Kittens is a quirky and fast-paced card game that brings together some small elements of strategy, a good amount of luck and just the right pinch of absurdity. The Recipes for Disaster collection successfully builds upon the foundations of the original game, offering a fresh and engaging experience for both casual and dedicated players. Its blend of strategy, luck and humour remains intact, while the new cards and mechanics inject an extra dose of excitement and interaction to the games. In my experience, I found that the game would play best at 4 players, while falling a bit short on the 2 player variants. But overall, it is a great game to have on your collection either to host or bring to a party where people can have a laugh at themselves and not take life too seriously. If you can relate to that or if you're already a fan of the original "Exploding Kittens" and are looking to take your gameplay to the next level, this collection is well worth the investment!
