'Exploding Kittens' card game sets Kickstarter record

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- Exploding Kittens, a simple card game that's being called a non-lethal kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette, blew up the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, earning a record $8.87 million in 30 days.

The card game is the most backed and most funded game project ever on Kickstarter with 219,382 people pledging money. That's 87,825 percent more than the $10,000 mark the creators hoped to get.

"That makes it the third-most-funded project in Kickstarter history. Not bad for a humble card game, huh?" Kickstarter said on its blog.

For the game, players take turns drawing cards until someone picks up an exploding kitten card. While the game could be over at that point, there are lots of options to avoid exploding, according to the creators, game designers Elan Lee and Shane Small and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman.

"The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck," they said.

In a Reddit session, Lee said they never anticipated such strong backing and are scrambling to get the orders out to backers by July. They only made an initial order of 500 decks.

"Before we started the campaign, I called a number of fulfillment houses and asked for quotes to package and ship a card game based on our estimates," he said. "Two weeks ago I got a return call from one of those houses, "Hi Elan! Just wanted to follow up on your inquiry and see if you were still interested in that order for 500 decks of cards?" I had flashes to that scene in JAWS where Roy Scheider sees the immense great white for the first time and says in a stupor "you're gonna need a bigger boat."

And we're done. To everyone who backed the game: thank you. https://t.co/cQH2USkDya pic.twitter.com/3CkLClISwl

— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) February 20, 2015