Exploding Kittens

Russian roulette with kittens, which is exactly as popular as it sounds.

The original. Exploding Kittens ran the most-backed Kickstarter in the platform's history and then sold in numbers that made the board game trade sit up. You draw cards until somebody pulls an Exploding Kitten, at which point they are out — unless they happen to be holding a Defuse, in which case they slide it back into the deck wherever they like, and now everyone else has a problem.

Mechanically it is barely more than that, and the rest is Matthew Inman's artwork doing the heavy lifting. Skip cards, attacks, see-the-futures and nopes let you shove the danger sideways onto whoever you like least, and games run about a quarter of an hour. It is not a thinker's game and does not pretend to be — it is a reliable way to get five people who do not play board games to play a board game.

Perfect for: The person who insists they hate board games, roughly ninety seconds before they start plotting.

2–5 players | 15 minutes | Age 7+