Exploding Puppy

  • Description: Custom made Party card game inspired by “Exploding Kittens”
  • Technology: LaTeX, Python
  • Scale: Side-project (in less than a year)
  • Team Size: Only me (received feedback from playtesters)
  • Job: Using an existing game, identifying the weaknesses and iteratively improving on it.
  • Biggest Learning: “Balancing” a chaotic party game can be very rewarding. Tweaking rules only a little bit might exponentially enlargen the design space, making producing more and unique content way easier. On the other hand, overdoing this leads to way too many rules that don’t fit a simple party game, so balancing the rules vs. design space is difficult, but also fun.

Description:

Exploding Kittens is a quick and fun party game about risk, chaos, and ruining friendships in the best way possible. Sounds good, so why change it?
I personally am not a fan of “objectively” better cards, and Kittens has a ton of them. Additionally, I found the replayability of the game to be a little on the weak side. Even though haven gotten numerous expansion, the actual good content was still small. Playing the game for ~5-10 times, you probably have seen everything and the fun goes down. Even the (at that point) recent idea of “recipes” (introduced in “Exploding Kittens: Recipes for Disaster”) were played through very quickly.

This concept aims at fixing these problems. I tweaked the base rules a little bit, by introducing meaningful card colors, and establishing some detailed rules for situations where Kittens did not even have any rules for. Additionally, I changed a lot of the existing cards to be more balanced, and added a TON of new ones (in the range of times 3 the number of actual interesting cards from kittens^^).

My adaption was very well accepted in multiple groups of friends of mine, and one friend even borrowed it for a vacation of them.