The new card game, Exploding Kittens, co-created by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal webcomic, has more backers than any Kickstarter campaign in history and is the highest grossing tabletop game Kickstarter ever, with 21 days to go.

The card game was co-created by Matthew Inman, Elan Lee, and Shane Small.  Inman’s nonfiction graphic novel, The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, is currently ranked at #5 on the book channel best-selling adult graphic novel chart (see "December BookScan--Top 20 Graphic Novels").

Small worked for WizKids as a senior art director from 2002-2004, worked on Marvel and DC HeroClix and Mage Knight and was part of a team that won an Origins Award for Rocketmen (see "'Rocketmen: Axis of Evil' CSG" and "2005 Origins Awards Announced").  Lee has worked as a game designer for both Microsoft Game Studios and Xbox Entertainment Studios.

Exploding Kittens is a humorous party card game version of Russian roulette.  Players draw cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and is eliminated.  However, the deck is made up of cards that let players avoid exploding by various strategic means, including shuffling the deck, defusing the kitten or forcing opponents to draw multiple cards.  The basic game includes 56 cards, instructions, and a game box.  The game is for 2-4 players, ages 7 and up, and plays in 20 minutes.  Pledge price is $20.00.

A second "NSFW" expansion deck is also available. It can be played separately or combined with the standard deck to support up to 8 players.  This second deck is included in the $35 pledge.

The $10,000 Kickstarter campaign was funded in 20 minutes, and raised $1M in seven hours. Within seven days it had drawn the most backers of any campaign in Kickstarter history, and as of this writing, has raised $4,686,200 from 118,955 backers ($39.93/backer average). This well exceeds the current leader on ICv2’s chart Top 10 Tabletop Game Kickstarters chart, Reaper Miniatures’ Bones, which raised $3.4 million in August 2012 (see “Top 10 Tabletop Game Kickstarters”).  Kickstarter itself lists video and computer games, video games devices, and tabletop games in the same “Games” category, but the simple card game is currently ranked #2 in the category behind the OUYA video game console device ($8.6 M).  The game’s overall Kickstarter ranking is currently #7, behind The Veronica Mars Movie Project ($5.7M) and Bring Reading Rainbow Back ($5.4 M).

ICv2 reached out to the Exploding Kittens team for information on trade release, and a representative responded via e-mail, "We'll be approaching retail options toward the end of our campaign."  The campaign runs through February 19th.