Exploding Kittens, the card game featuring several illustrations from The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman), has officially become the most backed project on Kickstarter. It blew past the previous leader, the Veronica Mars movie’s 91k backers, early this morning and continues to climb – currently sitting at 107k backers at the time of this writing.
The essence of Exploding Kittens is simple. As the Kickstarter page itself says, it’s “Russian Roulette” with exploding kittens.
Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck.
A huge majority of the popularity of the game comes from the fact that it has dozens of original drawings and animations from the popular web comic arist, The Oatmeal. His work can be seen on the numerous cards themselves (along with his trademark humor), and the entire Kickstarter video is his own animations. That’s not to say the game itself is solely the work of Matthew Inman by any means, as it is being created by Xbox employees Elan Lee and Shane Small as well.
Inman is no stranger to crowd-sourcing large projects. He recently raised over $1.37m for a Nikola Tesla Museum, which also garnered the attention of Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk who chipped in another $1m. He also humorously raised $220,024 in a crowd-funded donation to charity as a way to rebel against a potential lawsuit from FunnyJunk.com.
Exploding Kittens started with a modest goal of $10,000, which was funded completely in a mere 20 minutes after launching. It still has a ways to go if it hopes to become the highest funded project, however. That title is currently held by the “Coolest Cooler,” which completed its funding back in August of last year with a whopping $13.2 million. Luckily for Exploding Kittens, it still has 22 days to go and plenty of rewards to give out, so there’s a pretty good chance it’s about to blow every other Kickstarter record away.
[button type=”link” link=”https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens” variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: Kickstarter[/button]
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
