What happens when you take an award-winning cartoonist and two Xbox game designers and have them make a board game? Something that's apparently worth $8 million.
After being announced in January, the card game Exploding Kittens quickly received full funding on Kickstarter within 24 hours of the campaign's start. However, users found the concept to be so simple and unique that they slowly continued to fund it. At the end of the campaign, Exploding Kittens had received more than $8 million in funding from more than 219,000 backers.
Exploding Kittens is now the third-highest funded Kickstarter campaign, as well as the highest funded game on Kickstarter. The Ouya game console previously held both titles. The only two campigns that have recieved more funding than Exploding Kittens are the Coolest Cooler and the Pebble Watch, which recently announced a campaign to fund a new version of the smartwatch.
The Kickstarter page for Exploding Kittens describes the game as "A highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette." According to the rules, players will go around drawing cards until one of the players draws an exploding kitten and loses.
However, the game is designed so that players can manipulate the deck in order to survive. Players will be able to play certain cards that would let players see what's next, force opponents to draw multiple cards, or shuffle the deck.
The game was designed by The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Liman and Xbox designers Elan Lee and Shane Small. Backers should expect to see their copies of the game by June 2015.
