Why, when we play Exploding Kittens, does it always comes down to the last card in the deck or so?

Question

When I've played exploding-kittens almost always, through normal play, the kitten card ends up getting "pushed" down such that it ends up just being the last card, and if its not the last card its one of the bottom 5 or so.

I've seen other questions here about 'running out of cards' but that is not the situation I'm talking about. We get to the end\last card ... its just that that card is almost always the kitten card.

I've only played exploding-kittens about 10 times, and usually its just 2 players, but something similar happened I believe when I played with 3 or 4 players. The game is still fun but ends up being a bit predictable so ...

Is this normal? Am I potentially missing a rule or something?

Answer 1

With 52 cards and 4 players, there are about 17 cards per Exploding Kitten, so the probability of the last one being in the last 5 cards is about 5/17, or about 1/3, so it certainly should happen frequently, and confirmation bias may make it seem to happen more frequently.

However, the other factor is that avoiding Exploding Kittens is the whole point of the game, and a significant part of that is moving an Exploding Kitten down into the deck if you would have drawn it. After an entire game of Exploding Kittens being moved down the deck, they are disproportionately represented at the bottom of the deck.