Say What? 'Exploding Kittens' Game Scores Record Kickstarter Support
Try wrapping your head around this one -- the most backed campaign in Kickstarter history is a card game called Exploding Cats. Go ahead and read that as many times as you wish, just be warned it won't ever make sense. Nothing does anymore, so rather than try and figure out how and why Exploding Kittens was able to turn a crowdfunding site on its head, let's just roll with it.
We'll get to the details of the game in a moment, but first let's appreciate some stats. Here's a project that reached its modest goal of $10,000 and became fully funded within the first 20 minutes. It raked in 10 times that amount in less than an hour, and is now approaching $5 million in funding from nearly 126,000 backers with 19 days yet to go.
Remember Oculus Rift, the VR headset that was ultimately sold to Facebook? That too had a pretty successful run on Kickstarter, though nothing like Exploding Kittens. Oculus Rift surpassed its much larger goal of $250,000 and ended up with $2.4 million in pledges from 9,522 backers. How quaint.
So, what the flip is Exploding Kittens? It's a fairly simple and decidedly silly card game, or put another way, a "highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette." The way it works is you put the cards on a table and you along with your kitten loving friends take turns drawing them. If you draw an exploding kitten card, you explode (not really) and are out of the game.
That is, unless you play a Defuse card. These cards contain things like laser pointers, catnip sandwiches, and other items of interest to cats. But more importantly, they keep you in the game. Alternately, you can play various other cards that might be in your hand and skip a turn -- they allow you to take a peek at the next card, shuffle the deck, attack other players, and secretly relocate an exploding cat card.
And of course there are cat cards that activate special powers, because why wouldn't there be? In all, there are 56 cards to a deck, plus instructions an a "nifty little box."
The Internet clearly loves cats, hence why this project seems to defy logic with its record breaking status. But the team behind the project also deserve kudos for keeping the reward tiers simple and straightforward.
For $20, you get an Exploding Kittens deck. Spend $35 and you'll also get the deck, plus a NSFW version (so two decks total). These are the only tiers that are still available, but in case you're wondering, there was a $100 reward tier that got you two copies of both decks, one of each that was signed by the creators, and the $500 tier got you everything from the previous tiers plus a custom drawn card.
You know you want a deck, even if only to be part of Kickstarter history. Click here and happy gaming.
We'll get to the details of the game in a moment, but first let's appreciate some stats. Here's a project that reached its modest goal of $10,000 and became fully funded within the first 20 minutes. It raked in 10 times that amount in less than an hour, and is now approaching $5 million in funding from nearly 126,000 backers with 19 days yet to go.
Remember Oculus Rift, the VR headset that was ultimately sold to Facebook? That too had a pretty successful run on Kickstarter, though nothing like Exploding Kittens. Oculus Rift surpassed its much larger goal of $250,000 and ended up with $2.4 million in pledges from 9,522 backers. How quaint.
So, what the flip is Exploding Kittens? It's a fairly simple and decidedly silly card game, or put another way, a "highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette." The way it works is you put the cards on a table and you along with your kitten loving friends take turns drawing them. If you draw an exploding kitten card, you explode (not really) and are out of the game.
That is, unless you play a Defuse card. These cards contain things like laser pointers, catnip sandwiches, and other items of interest to cats. But more importantly, they keep you in the game. Alternately, you can play various other cards that might be in your hand and skip a turn -- they allow you to take a peek at the next card, shuffle the deck, attack other players, and secretly relocate an exploding cat card.
And of course there are cat cards that activate special powers, because why wouldn't there be? In all, there are 56 cards to a deck, plus instructions an a "nifty little box."
The Internet clearly loves cats, hence why this project seems to defy logic with its record breaking status. But the team behind the project also deserve kudos for keeping the reward tiers simple and straightforward.
For $20, you get an Exploding Kittens deck. Spend $35 and you'll also get the deck, plus a NSFW version (so two decks total). These are the only tiers that are still available, but in case you're wondering, there was a $100 reward tier that got you two copies of both decks, one of each that was signed by the creators, and the $500 tier got you everything from the previous tiers plus a custom drawn card.
You know you want a deck, even if only to be part of Kickstarter history. Click here and happy gaming.
