This Card Game Just Raised More Money Than Veronica Mars

Exploding Kittens

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 (the Ouya raised just a little bit more, but that was a console, not a game). “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).