Two weeks ago, Elan Lee got a call that made him feel like he was living in the movie Jaws. It was about two weeks into the highly successful Kickstarter campaign for his new card game Exploding Kittens, and one of his potential suppliers called "to see if you were still interested in that order for 500 decks of cards." By that point he already knew he was going to need about 500 thousand.
"I had flashes," Lee says, "to that scene where Roy Scheider (Brody) sees the immense great white for the first time and says in a stupor "you're gonna need a bigger boat."
When Exploding Kittens—a tabletop card game that's essentially Russian Roulette with cats—ended its Kickstarter run tonight, it had raised more than $8.7 million. (They'd initially asked for $10,000.) For context, that's about $3 million more than Rob Thomas scared up to make a friggin' Veronica Mars movie. It got more than 200,000 backers—more than any other Kickstarter project, by a longshot—and is the most funded game in the site's history. "Until Exploding Kittens came along, we hadn't seen the Internet at large descend on a project and embrace it at this crazy scale," says Luke Crane, Kickstarter's lead for games projects.
So what caused thefuror? For one, Lee is not only a veteran of Microsoft Game Studios, but also one of the co-founders of 42 Entertainment, the ARG company that created the ilovebees promotion for Halo 2. Then there are his colleagues on the project: Matthew Inman, who created comics web site The Oatmeal, and Shane Small, who previously worked with Lee on the Xbox. Basically, these guys know the Internet. They also know games well enough to gamify their Kickstarter, getting many of their backers to try to earn rewards by doing stunts like taking pictures of people in cat ears. (That one, Lee says, briefly crashed Dropbox when people tried to upload their photos.)
But for all of the audience engagement and such, they're still just three guys who made a goofy card game that lets you attack with "thousand-year back hair" and "bear-o-dactyls." (Check out some of the cards and gameplay above.) So why is it so popular? Here's how Exploding Kittens came to be and a few clues as to why it's the new Cards Against Humanity ($15,570 on Kickstarter).
Small and Lee cooked up the original idea for Exploding Kittens, but it really popped off when Lee met Inman on a vacation with a group of friends (and friends of friends) last fall. Everyone on the trip kept asking to see the game, but Lee suggested they do, like, outside stuff. "Finally one night I was persuaded to show them my game made up of a silly deck of poker cards that I’d drawn all over with a Sharpie," Lee says. "I told them we could play for 10 minutes, but then we should really go scuba diving or hiking or anything other than sit in a room playing this game. Ten minutes turned into an hour, and an hour turned into four." Eventually, the group was playing the game every night---and at the end of the trip Inman asked if he could join Lee and Small's efforts. Lee said he'd have to think about it. "At least that’s what I would have done if I had any ability to play it cool," he says. "Instead I think I started screaming 'YES! YES! YES!!!' and flailing around the room."
When playing Exploding Kittens, you have to toss your friends onto feline grenades so that they get booted out of the game before you do. That makes it a quick family-friendly party game, but also one with a complex strategic mechanic. "We like to call it 'benevolent betrayal,'" Lee says. "You play cards to try to benefit your own hand, but there is no such thing as an innocent move---everything you do in this game either causes an immediate problem for a fellow player. The cards work themselves out so that you're constantly wreaking havoc on your fellow players or discovering a new clever way to prevent an explosion."
Originally, the game was called Bomb Squad, but Inman wanted to change it. "When Matt came on board he suggested we change the name to Exploding Kittens," Lee says. "'Because… the Internet.'"
So what do you do when you're like 1000 percent funded? Just make a crapton of games. (Full Disclosure: This writer made a pledge to get an NSFW deck.) "We made a promise to our backers on the very first day, which was so simple: Send us 20 bucks, and we'll send you our game," Lee says. "There’s a massive amount of work to do now, and an unknown quantity of problems in store when dealing with this many orders. Our plan is to use all our resources to make all of that stuff invisible and fulfill our promise."
The creators of Exploding Kittens put a lot of thought into building a community around their game (e.g., sending pizza to animal shelters and encouraging backers to go hang out, hosting Twitter drinking parties), but Lee says, "I don't think there was any single magic ingredient." He does, however, add that "the mad brilliance of The Oatmeal was epic for us and gamifying our Kickstarter page gave us a massive boost, but treating the community like a huge team of collaborators was probably the glue that held everything together. Also, unicorn enchiladas, because who else has those?"
