Game Like a Mother

Quick Take: Created by the makers of The Oatmeal, this game is simple to pick up but employs a reasonable amount of strategy. Also, it scores big points for me because it is a quick enough game and the pictures are fun and distracting enough that my hyper competitive oldest child handles losing reasonably well as long as we have time for a few games and he wins at least once. And FYI, there is an adult version of this game ... it is very NSFW. Don't get it if you have kids in the house. For some reason I chose to get the adult version when the game first came out (because I'm an adult, right?) and then I had to get rid of it after an instance of playing the game with some adult friends and having to hide cards from my very curious 6 year old. Oops. 

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How to Play: A lot of new games have videos you can watch that give an easy rundown of the rules. This is one of them and I highly recommend watching the link included in the official rules if you purchase the game. Basically, you don't want an exploding kitten card to come along and explode your hand/you. The last man standing in the game is the winner. There are lots of actions cards you can play like defuse, nope attack, skip, favor, shuffle, and see the future. They all say what they do on the actual cards (I love this) and are ways to protect your hand from getting an exploding kitten card. Defuse is the most important card, it's what you play if you are unfortunate enough to draw an exploding kitten. You can play zero cards on your turn or as many action cards as you like, there are no minimum or maximum numbers of cards to have in your hand. The main thing is that you have to draw one card at the end of every turn. You can steal cards from your opponents, use the actions on the cards you have to try to make someone else draws an exploding kitten card, you have a lot of strategic options available to try and make sure someone else gets exploding kittens cards so you win the game. 

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Variations: They do have very simple variations which are to collect two of a kind or three of a kind and use them to get cards from an opponent. If you have five cards with different icons you can pick any card you like from the discard pile. My husband and I sometimes play this game with our six year old and it works really well for the two of us to target each other early on and then when one of us gets out we go and sit with the six year old and help him with his strategy for the rest of the game. 

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Similar Games To Check Out: Bears vs Babies, Sorry! Revenge, Monopoly Deal, Codenames, Kingdomino, Unstable Unicorns

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