Exploding Kittens

Overview

Exploding Kittens is an upcoming card game featuring illustrations by Oatmeal founder Matt Inman that was successfully crowdfunded through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in January 2015.

Background

On January 20th, 2015, Inman submitted a Kickstarter^[1] campaign for Exploding Kittens, a multi-player, shedding-type card game designed in collaboration with Elan Lee and Shane Small (shown below). In the game, a group of up to eight players take turns pulling cards until an “exploding kitten” card is drawn, at which point the player is eliminated from the game, unless a special “defuse” card is used. The same day, the website ExplodingKittens^[2] was created with an infographic run-down of gameplay and rules.

Notable Developments

Online Reception

In the first 20 minutes, the Kickstarter reached its goal of $10,000. Within seven hours of launch, the campaign had received over $1 million in funds. By the end of the next day, $2 million had been raised. 48 hours from its creation, Inman released a comic revealing that the game was the 22nd most-funded Kickstarter campaign in history, the 11th most-funded game and the most-funded card game ever (shown below).

By January 23rd, the Kickstarter campaign had received more than $3 million in funding. On January 26th, the creators of the campaign announced that they had received upwards of 100,000 backers and that a stand-alone NSFW card deck would be released for the game. Within the first week, the proposal accumulated nearly $4 million, setting a new record for the biggest tabletop game project on Kickstarter.

News Media Coverage

During the first week of launch, the game’s online success was covered by a variety of news sites, including The Register,^[3] Business Insider,^[4] Forbes,^[5]CNN^[6] and Mashable.^[7]