I had this idea about an inflation-themed hand management card game that reimplements Exploding Kittens, and I wanted to share it here.
For a quick refresher, Exploding Kittens is a crazy Russian Roulette style party card game where you try to avoid drawing the titular Exploding Kitten cards. On their turn, a player can play as many cards as they want with effects like stealing other players’ cards, making them take extra turns or peeking into the draw pile. To end their turn, players must draw a card from the draw pile, and if that card is an Exploding Kitten, they must either counter it by playing one of the special Defuse cards or explode and get eliminated from the game. Last player standing wins.
So, the main gist with this idea is that each player has soft and hard limits on their hand size. Drawing past the soft limit will let the player save themselves with the rebranded Deflate cards, but drawing past the hard limit means that that’s it – the player bursts and is out of the game.
Other things include:
- at the end of their turn, a player may draw as many cards as they want, but they must draw at least one;
- to reinforce the hand size limits, if you draw a rebranded Exploding Kitten card, you have to draw a set number of cards (around 5-7) and end your turn there; for every extra EK card drawn this way, shuffle it back into the draw pile and draw new cards;
- the attack cards make the affected player draw X times as many cards to end their turn, and attacks can’t be stacked more than 3 times;
- and if the draw pile runs out of cards, shuffle the discard pile to form a new one so that the play continues until there’s one blimp left.
And that seems to be it on my end. If anyone wants to flesh this out into something playable, you’re always welcome to.