“But you don’t want to treat Kickstarter like a storefront you can go to a store and buy a game. “I thought we were just building a page to ask for $10,000 and get this thing off the ground,” said Lee, who spoke with The Daily Beast while planning pizza parties at cat shelters around the country as special backer rewards. Supporters not only kept buying game decks, they also took to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with goat selfies, PotatoCat pics, and other thematically related social media cues, all for a game none of them have yet laid eyes on. The tech and transmedia veteran who co-founded startups like digital content studio Fourth Wall and EDOC, a line of T-shirts embedded with hidden codes tied to a murder-mystery narrative, tapped into his background to turn the Kickstarter platform into a call to arms for the Exploding Kittens movement.

(Lee credits the Cards Against Humanity crew for lending them “pure, friendly, amazing, altruistic advice” once Exploding Kittens blew up.) Who can resist a game in which you can strategically deploy The Thousand-Year Back Hair, Bat Farts, and Bear-A-Dactyls to take down your enemies?Īs Lee discovered, becoming a part of the Exploding Kittens story was, like, LOLcats and cute animals, catnip to the Internet. The game’s engaging concept and artwork by “The Oatmeal” comics creator Matthew Inman gave Exploding Kittens a cheeky Cards Against Humanity appeal. It’s not hard to see why retro-hungry millennials sprung so hard for Exploding Kittens. But they can also strategically deflect the kittens onto opponents or “defuse” them with things like laser pointers and catnip sandwiches, use the power of a unicorn enchilada (to see the future, AKA three cards ahead), and tap select cards like the TacoCat to activate special powers.

The gameplay goes like this: Players take turns drawing from a deck of cards until someone draws a kitten and, you guessed it, explodes. “It was literally a deck of poker cards that I had taken a Sharpie to and scribbled all over,” explained Elan Lee, co-creator of the overnight Internet phenomenon Exploding Kittens, a crowdfunding of unheard-of success that closed today with over $8.7 million in pledges-or, roughly 87,000 percent of its initial $10,000 goal.

The most-backed Kickstarter campaign in history began with a simple deck of cards.

Unicorn game like exploding kittens