Giving card games a burst of enthusiasm
Pix courtesy http://www.explodingkittens.com/#how
The most-backed Kickstarter project of all time is a simple card game. Matthew Inman, the creative genius behind the online comic The Oatmeal, initially asked backers to come forward and raise $10,000 to bring the Exploding Kittens card game to life. The game, co-developed with Elan Leeand Shane Small, features all the stuff the three men loved – not only are there exploding kittens, but there are wise goats who can save you, portable cheetah butts you can wear to escape in haste, and thousand-year back hair that you can deploy to send your competitors running screaming. And that’s just the beginning of the weird stuff.
Kickstarter users liked the card game so much that they had it fully funded in the first 20 minutes. Then they kept going. It was 1000% funded in the first hour, within 24 hours it had reached $1 million. On February 16, with three days to go, the game had a staggering 158,164backers who between them had pledged $6,287,009. The developers responded by creating ‘stretch goals’ that drew in more backers and offered rewards to everyone who had invested. As part of the whole process, fans are going more than a little crazy – sharing selfies with goats and pictures of themselves revelling in the glory of their own back hair.
Forbes, Mashable and Newsweek have all written about the phenomenon. The latter quoted Small as saying: “We’re in totally crazy territory here,” going on to note that the trio have never been in a room together and are only now contemplating their first in-person meeting.
This hasn’t stopped them from coming up with what has been described a “highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette.” A detailed comic breaks down the rules for you on the Exploding kittens site. Players must avoid drawing a card in which a cat kills you by just being a cat – she might innocently set off an explosion by walking across a keyboard, launching a nuclear bomb, or gnawing on a live grenade.
You can defuse the cats with a laser pointer, ‘cat therapy,’ catnip sandwiches, or divert their lethal power by playing one of your action cards that allow you to tap the powers of 1000-year back-hair, and unicorn enchiladas. Alternately you could also play a ‘cat card’, which are distinct from the exploding kittens. These include such gems as tacocat (the palindrome cat). ‘The gameplay of exploding kittens is particularly unique, because the longer you play, the funner it gets,’ the designers promise. ‘As you draw cards, fewer and fewer cards remain, which means the chances of getting an exploding kitten grows higher. It blends the perfect balance of strategy, luck, and player-to-player interaction.’
When asked why they had zeroed in on cats instead of another animal, Inman, who has created comics for The Oatmeal with titles like ‘How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You’ and ‘My Dog: The Paradox,’ says a cat has the “same demeanour and attitude and habits of a full-grown big cat,” like a lion or a tiger, but is small enough to own, which makes for an interesting dynamic with humans.