Exploding Kittens started as a single Kickstarter deck illustrated by The Oatmeal, and it has since grown into a whole family of card games that share a name, an art style, and a lot of table time at parties.
That growth is great for the brand, but it creates a real organizational problem once a household owns the base game plus two or three of its siblings.
Each deck is small enough on its own that it's tempting to just toss them all loose in a drawer, which is exactly how cards end up mixed between games or lost entirely.
Here's the actual card size, a clear picture of what's in the ecosystem today, and a practical way to keep it all sorted.
The original Exploding Kittens base game uses 56 cards at standard poker size, 2.5 by 3.5 inches (63.5mm by 89mm), the same footprint shared by the vast majority of mainstream trading card games. This sizing holds across the ecosystem's other standalone decks and expansion packs as well, since they're all built to mix into the same play experience.
That consistency is good news for sleeve shopping specifically: unlike several other games in this guide series, Exploding Kittens doesn't require a specialty sleeve size, and a single pack of standard-size sleeves covers the entire family.
Three expansions add directly onto the original 56-card base deck: Imploding Kittens adds 20 cards and raises the maximum player count from five to six, Streaking Kittens adds 15 cards illustrated by The Oatmeal, and Barking Kittens adds another 20 cards introducing new mechanics like Bury and Tower of Power. A household running the base game plus all three expansions is managing 111 cards in active rotation.
These three are true expansions in the traditional sense, meaning they're designed to shuffle directly into the existing base deck rather than being played on their own.
Separately from the base-deck expansions, Exploding Kittens Inc. has released standalone games that share the core mechanics but ship as their own complete decks rather than add-ons. Exploding Kittens: Curse You!, confirmed as a current release on the publisher's own site, ships with 67 cards plus envelope and sticker components built around a good-versus-bad spell mechanic.
Exploding Kittens: Rage Mode, also a current standalone release per the publisher's product page, ships with 65 cards and a cat-shaped figurine built around a more aggressive, betrayal-heavy ruleset. Both are their own complete games for 2 to 5 players rather than expansions that shuffle into the original deck, which matters for how you store them.
Because Curse You! and Rage Mode are separate, self-contained decks rather than add-ons, mixing their cards into the original base deck's storage box will actively break both games rather than just adding content to one. Each standalone release needs to stay in its own deck box, clearly labeled, the same way a collector would keep two different TCGs apart.
The three true expansions, by contrast, are meant to live together with the base deck once a group has decided to play with all of them, so keeping Imploding, Streaking, and Barking Kittens shuffled into one combined deck box is the correct call rather than a storage mistake.
With every deck in the ecosystem sharing the same standard poker-size card, a budget-friendly penny sleeve works just as well here as a premium matte sleeve, since Exploding Kittens sessions are short and don't put the same cumulative shuffling wear on cards that a deck-builder like Dominion does. The EVORETRO Card Sleeves for Pokemon or Sport Card Penny Sleeves are an affordable way to protect party-game decks without overspending on a game that sees more drinking-game-adjacent handling than archival care.
Once a household owns the base game, its three expansions, and either standalone sibling, that's easily four or five separate decks needing their own labeled storage. A set of compact deck boxes, one per release, keeps each game ready to grab independently rather than needing to sort a combined pile before every game night.
The EVORETRO Plastic Deck Box, sized for up to 100 standard cards, comfortably fits any single release in this ecosystem, including the combined base-plus-expansions deck at 111 cards if sleeved thinly, or split across two boxes if sleeved at full thickness.
Standard poker size, 2.5 by 3.5 inches (63.5mm by 89mm), across the whole ecosystem.
56 cards for 2 to 5 players.
No, both are standalone complete decks, not add-ons to the original base game.
Yes, true expansions are meant to shuffle directly into the base deck.
Keep every deck in the ecosystem sorted and protected with EVORETRO's Plastic Deck Box, sized for a full standard-size party-game deck.
See our Board Game Card Sleeve Buying Guide for general sizing theory, and Starting Card-Based Board Games: A Buying Guide for Newcomers for how Exploding Kittens compares to other party-game starters.
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