Without Fail

Without Fail is a challenge game published by Exploding Kittens. It focuses on the people and the experience rather than the challenge and skill, asking: “how much do you believe in your friends?” by pushing you to guess how well you think your friends can play without knowing what they’ll be doing. It’s a game about celebrating friendship and failure, laughing with each other, and being silly together.

There are 150 challenges in the game that use all sorts of different components for each challenge. Because of that, it is a massively-scoped, content-heavy game that asks players to play a unique game for every single one of its 150 cards. As a team of developers who have a strong focus on mass-market appeal, clarity, and accuracy, this was an incredible testing and development challenge. (You can learn more about our development process and how we emphasized inclusivity and accessibility in our 2024 Game Developers Conference talk in the Tabletop Summit, “Without Fail: A Player-Centric Approach to Mass Market Game Design.“)

Elan Lee, the founder of Exploding Kittens and designer of Without Fail, explains the philosophy of the game well in this video: