Exploding Kittens made a huge mark as a quirky tabletop card game the previous year. And now it’s been adapted for an iOS game that debuted today in Apple’s App Store.
The creators at Substantial hope to carry the explosive demand for the table card version of the game — driven by the game’s funny art style and funny gameplay — that debuted the previous year and parlay it into a much larger audience in the $30 billion mobile game industry.
The table card game was the most funded game in Kickstarter history, raising more than $8 million from 219,382 contributors. Its creators are Elan Lee, the creator of eDoc Laundry; Matt Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal online comic; and Shane Small, the previous principal art director at Xbox Entertainment Studios.
The earlier Exploding Kittens was a paper-based card game (we had fun playing it in our hands-on demo) that will be like playing Russian Roulette, where the loser is the person who draws the Exploding Kittens card. The game’s zaniness, the Oatmeal’s involvement, and its viral status on social media helped propel it. It says something when an idea is so creative that everybody wants to throw money at it.
For the 1.99 digital game, the founders teamed up with Seattle-based digital product studio Substantial to create an iOS app that would not just replicate the original game however, evolve and improve it for old and new fans alike. Two to five players can play it as a multiplayer title. The digital game has new cards that the paper one doesn’t, and it's sound effects. The game is built in Unity, and it uses art from The Oatmeal.
In the table game, you put the deck of cards face down. You take turns drawing cards, and if you draw the Exploding Kitten card, you are out — unless that player has a “defuse” card that can neutralize the kittens with laser pointers, kitten therapy, and catnip sandwiches. You can also deploy a Tacocat, Abracrab Lincoln, Magical Meat Bikini, and a Catterwocky. Action cards do things like remove or mitigate the kittens. You can deploy the thousand-year back hair, peek at cards by rubbing the belly of a pig-a-corn, skip a turn by wearing a portable cheetah butt, or seek out the wisdom of a goat wizard. You have to decide which cards to play, when to play them, and which of your opponents to target. Every card you draw increases your odds of drawing the Exploding Kitten, making things tenser as the game progresses.
Above: Exploding Kittens on mobile
Image Credit: Substantial