WTF? Exploding Kittens Game gets $8 Million on KS

There’s gotta be something wrong with the world when a game, that’s barely a game at all from what I’ve been able to see on their Kickstarter page, garners 200 000 backers and $8,8 million. That’s double the amount of backers that the children’s literacy project Reading Rainbow managed to attract, and Reading Rainbow only made $5,4 million.

Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game.

This can’t be about the game – there’s not enough information about it except how it got started:

Exploding Kittens started when Shane Small proposed a game to Elan Lee where a joker was inserted into a deck of cards and they took turns picking cards until the joker came up.

So what’s it about then? In my opinion it’s entirely about having a mildly norm breaking theme pasted on three brand names.

The game was created by Elan Lee (Xbox, ARGs), Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), and Shane Small (Xbox, Marvel). We think this game combines all the things we’re best at creating, and and put together this Kickstarter campaign because we can’t build this without you.

Oh, and they namedrop another card game in the genre:

We’re already working with our pals at Cards Against Humanity to make sure that no matter how many people pledge, everyone gets their Exploding Kittens quickly after the campaign ends.

Now, is Exploding Kittens a bad game? I don’t know, since it hasn’t been produced yet and they released absolutely nothing about the gameplay except for a few cards. No rules, no gameplay videos, nada.

So you can say that I am disappointed in the fact that kittens and mild NSFW keep beats gameplay, story and social responsibility. What does that tell us about our world?