Latest news with #ExplodingKittens
Geek Girl Authority
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
What Your Favorite Card Game Says About You
Card games have a unique way of revealing more than just a knack for strategy or luck – they offer a glimpse into your personality. Whether you prefer games that test your wits, encourage social interaction, or simply provide a fun escape, your choice says a lot about how you think, how you play, and how you connect with others. Let's take a look at what your favorite card game might be telling people about who you are! Outplay, outwit, outcheat If you're bold, quick-witted, and love testing the limits – both your own and those of your opponents, Cheat is your go-to card game. You thrive on deception and suspense, knowing exactly when to bluff and when to fold. For the unapologetic jokester, always ready to push boundaries and spark laughter, Cards Against Humanity is the perfect choice. Psychologists would call you a 'high sensation seeker' – you crave novelty, enjoy flirting with social boundaries, and aren't afraid to go off-script. You get a thrill from bending the rules (without actually breaking them!), reading the room, and delivering those zingers that get everyone laughing or gasping. Decks, dice, and drama For fans of games like Warhammer and Magic: The Gathering, the battlefield is as much on the tabletop as in the mind. As a strategic thinker and an immersive creative, you're drawn to intricate worldbuilding, love mastering complex systems, and have a knack for seeing the big picture (as well as the tiniest details). Whether you're building the perfect deck or painting armies for hours, your commitment reveals patience, imagination, and a drive to outwit opponents on every level. Warhammer fans revel in narratives and customization, while Magic players love to invent combos that no one's ever tried before. You're the person who never shies away from lore, backstory, or inventing new scenarios, because half the fun is creating universes within universes. If you like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon TCG, you're definitely part of this club too! Masters of Mayhem If Uno is your favorite card game, odds are you're not afraid of a little chaos. Uno fans value spontaneity and adaptability. They roll with the punches, savoring every turn of fortune, from their own victory to a spectacular comeback by someone else. Quick-thinking and energetic, you love games that keep everyone on their toes and refuse to take setbacks too seriously. Fans of Exploding Kittens fit right into this lively category. You're drawn to absurd humor, and you thrive on unpredictability and embrace the joy of sudden twists. Both Uno and Exploding Kittens players share a zest for dynamic, fast-paced fun where adaptability and a sharp sense of humor are the ultimate winning strategies. The solitude strategist If you're drawn to Solitaire or Patience, you likely appreciate introspection, self-reliance, and the simple satisfaction of conquering a challenge on your own terms. You enjoy quiet moments, finding peace and focus in strategic decision-making and methodical play. Ultimately, every card game is a mirror, reflecting the unique vibe and personality you bring to the table, whether you crave the suspense and chaos or the strategic depths of card games. Who Gets To Be a Geek: Unpacking Gatekeeping in the Geek Community RELATED: SDCC 2025: Anne Rice Immortal Universe Panel Unveils Dark Delights for The Vampire Lestat and Talamasca
Business Wire
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Wire
10 Years of Mayhem: Exploding Kittens Launches First-Ever Board Game
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Exploding Kittens, a leading gaming and entertainment company, today launched Exploding Kittens: The Board Game, the company's first-ever board game to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Inspired by the original card game that started it all, this reimagined experience keeps the brand's signature artwork and irreverent humor while introducing an all-new way to play. Today, Exploding Kittens launched its first-ever board game to celebrate its 10th anniversary, which is inspired by the original card game. Share 'This year marks 10 years of Exploding Kittens, and we knew we wanted to celebrate by giving fans something big,' said Elan Lee, Co-Founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens. 'When we asked players what they wanted most, 84% said a board game, more than any other idea we tested. We set out to build something that feels instantly familiar to long-time fans, but bold and surprising enough to earn a spot on the shelf next to the original.' Exploding Kittens: The Board Game lets players race to the end of the track, using strategic action cards to sabotage opponents or escape disaster. The game starts simple: avoid Exploding Kitten spaces and be the first to reach the finish, but quickly escalates when players trigger a board flip from 'calm mode' to 'chaos mode.' In Chaos Mode, the board physically flips and every space transforms, allowing players to set traps, sabotage each other, or form temporary alliances. Easy to learn while unpredictable and endlessly competitive to play, the board game delivers a fast-paced experience that ensures no two games are the same. 'We didn't want to just stretch out the original game—we wanted to break it and rebuild it in a way that still felt like Exploding Kittens,' said Matthew Inman, Co-Founder of Exploding Kittens. 'The tricky part was keeping it short, chaotic, and funny while making it stand out in the sea of classics. That's where the pop-up board came from.' The Exploding Kittens team spent years researching materials, inventing new paper gearing mechanisms, and building countless prototypes to bring this pop-up board to life. To make the gameplay feel like cohesive magic, the board game components are designed to be nearly invisible, so it surprises and delights with every flip. While the craftsmanship may have evolved, the sense of humor hasn't aged a day. The game is packed with the same classic characters and signature artwork, making Exploding Kittens: The Board Game a love letter to fans both old and new. Best for players ages 7 and up, Exploding Kittens: The Board Game can be enjoyed by two to six players and takes about 20 minutes to play. The game is available for $24.99 at Amazon, Target, and now, and will arrive in Walmart stores nationwide beginning October 4. About Exploding Kittens Exploding Kittens is a leading game and entertainment company with a mission to inspire people to connect, laugh, and play fun games in the physical world. To date, Exploding Kittens is the #1 most-backed project in Kickstarter history and has sold over 60 million games. Started by former Xbox game designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal's founder Matthew Inman, Exploding Kittens and its family of games seek to reshape traditional game night into an entertaining person-to-person experience. Today, there are over 60 games available for purchase, an animated Netflix series that launched in July 2024, an exclusive Exploding Kittens mobile game for Netflix subscribers, an Exploding Kittens 2 mobile game available on iOS and Android, and a virtual reality game on Meta Quest.
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Celebate 10 Years Of Blowing Up Your Friends With Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens, designed by Matthew Inman, Elan Lee and Shane Small, was releasted 10 years ago ... More after a massive Kickstarter. One of the biggest successes on Kickstarter is a silly little card game played by millions. Exploding Kittens appeals across every age group with a low price point and very accessible gameplay. The object is simple; be the last one standing when all the kitten cards have exploded. This combination of simple gameplay and unique art has turned desginers Elan Lee and Matthew Inman into captains of the party game industry. Their company has since released several other games emphasizing experience such as Throw Throw Burrito and Let's Hit Each Other With Fake Swords. I spoke with them about where the original game came from and what they're doing to celebrate ten years of rowdy gameplay at bars, barbecues and family functions around the world. The Origins Of Exploding Kittens "Matt was doing The Oatmeal full-time and I had this idea for a little card game," said Lee. "I literally scribbled it on a deck of cards and at the same time resigned from my job at Microsoft. Ended up at an Airbnb in Hawaii for a vacation because everyone was burnt out and everyone needed a little break. We were just going to kind of like hang out and enjoy Hawaii. I remember Matt Inman said, 'Hey, I hear you got a card game. Here we are. There's a table. Let's play'. I remember thinking we should do this quickly. This is not why we're here. We're not here to play cards. We're not here to sit inside. Let's do this fast. Let's get off to paddle boarding and there's all the fun stuff outside. But we played the game and it was really fun. Matt immediately said, 'Let's play again.' And we played again. A few hours went by this way. I remember like after that session, [he]'I'd been approached by a guy who made board games six months earlier,' said Inman. 'We played this game and it was it was your kind of standard 'all right let's assign a point value to a card, this is this card is worth six and that card is worth one and six is greater than one.' So I win. And then he took a bunch of my characters and put them on the cards. And I was like, it didn't have that innate fun to it. When we played Exploding Kittens, it was the opposite where there were no characters. It was just a deck of cards. So it was like very very fun from the get-go. And I knew this is the game that would work.' 'At the time I was calling the game Bomb Squad because it was essentially Russian roulette,' said Lee. 'There were bombs. You were trying to avoid the bombs. don't explode. And Matt said, 'I want to partner up, but you can't call this thing Bomb Squad ecause it's just well, frankly, it's stupid. Like, of course, you're scared of the bombs. They explode and they're scary and who the hell cares.' Then he said something really brilliant. Instead, if you make the thing you're most scared of more subversive, like or more non-obvious, like cute, adorable, fuzzy little kittens, and you call the game Exploding Kittens, then you'd really have something. In that moment, the game was born. Exactly in that single sentence, all of Matt's brilliance tied up into this one thing. And off we off we went.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Exploding Kittens 10th Anniversary This little card game kept growing. It appeared in big box stores, it offered expansions like zombie kittens and a NSFW version to play after the kids have gone to bed. It's even made the jump to the modern day equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon with an animated Netflix series that premiered in 2024. The 10th Anniversary of the game presented a new design challenge. How to keep the simplicity of the original while offering a new experience to fans? The designers focused on a 3D game board that takes everything up a notich; the visuals, the gameplay and the overall experience. How do we make a new game that is interesting?" said Inman. 'We've had so many expansions and stuff. So, this was a way of like rebooting, refreshing that probably is more interesting, more fun to people. It was for me, at least to design it. The tricky thing is like you don't want to fall into the trap of all right, let's make it longer and bigger. Then people are bored because they play Exploding Kittens for a short experience. So, that was the challenge. Part two was how do we make this thing different? Like, how do we make it stand out? Because when Exploding Kittens came out, it was a bit of a refresh for the industry because a lot of games that were in card gaming were either esoteric like card games where every single character had a tunic and a sword on the cover, right? Or or they were card games that were invented in like the 50s that were like Accounting: The Board Game. We all were grew up on these games. Exploding Kittens was a bit of a refresh. What can we do to make it stand out and different? And that's where so the idea came from to have it be a pop-up game.' 'Here the goal is,' said Lee. 'okay, so we got our cool blue board. This is the easy version. You can see there's a board along the bottom. We tried something new where you flip it to hellscape mode. We thought, okay, well, now we're doing all this fun stuff and no one's ever seen that before, so that's fun. What if every single space on this board changed. You don't know how to play the game, but these numbers are good. Like these are how many cards you get to draw if you land on these things. There's a few exploding kittens. Those are the bad spaces you blow up if you land on there. Watch the exploding kittens because every single one changes as you flip it. Now we got a ton more explosions. Now all the numbers have gone down except for the ones at the very beginning which have all moved up because we want to put an advantage to the players in the front of the game. As you play cards to flip the board back and forth, now you're actually setting traps for people. Now you're looking at where they are on the board.' More information on the anniversary edition will be released soon. Though the board game looks to the future, the designers still remember the origins of the game that changed their lives fondly. They left a little tresure behind at the place that inspired Exploding Kittens. 'I was recently just looking through some old photos,' said Lee. 'I found one after we had this agreement on a partnership after we launched the thing on Kickstarter, after it became the the the most backed project of all time. Then we went and started a company to make more games. But the next year, we went back to that same Airbnb to have another little mini vacation and we took a now produced beautiful box of Exploding Kittens. Matt and I each signed it and we wrote 'invented here' and we like left it at that Airbnb. It's one of a kind. There's only one of those in the whole world. I have no idea who found it or what they thought of it but that thing exists in that house. I wonder what happened to it.'
Otago Daily Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Former lawyer's Red Herring board game hooks players
Simon and Belinda Mortlock in the middle of a game of Red Herring. Photo: Geoff Sloan From business lawyer to board game inventor, Governors Bay man Simon Mortlock has made quite the post-retirement shift. The inception of his board game, Red Herring, came from seeing the card game, Exploding Kittens, last year. 'I thought now that's a stupid game. If someone can make money out of a card game like that, then surely I can make a board game as well,' Mortlock said. Red Herring is a strategy game played by four to six people. The object is to be the first to construct your own jetty in one hour. The Governors Bay Jetty. Photo: Geoof Sloan Mortlock designed the game in a fundraising effort for the Governors Bay Jetty Restoration Trust. He is the trust's current patron and its former chair. 'If you haven't got it, you've got to make it,' he said. Mortlock was a lawyer for 53 years and a founding partner at Mortlock McCormack Law before retiring in 2021. His lawyer's skills translate to the game, where strategy and managing risk are crucial to winning. Mortlock, who lives in Governors Bay, compared the game to Monopoly but said it is more complex. The board is a map of Lyttelton Harbour with 36 different locations around the bay labelled in English and Te Reo, designed by Governors Bay artist, Russ Harris. 'It's a staggering amount of detail and there's very fine craftsmanship,' said Mortlock. Each player is given a coloured jetty and 20 planks worth of differing points to start the game. Players gain more planks when they complete a circuit or land on certain locations. Players can take planks from other players and use them strategically to decide whether to build their jetty first or maximise their points. It took Mortlock six months to iron out the rules while Harris designed the board. 'We played it over and over and over again to perfect it. 'I'm really thrilled with the quality of the outcome,' Mortlock said. The Caxton printed version costs $90 while the limited edition handcrafted board costs $345. Forty-nine handmade copies and 33 Caxton printed versions have sold so far. They have raised $13,000 for the Governors Bay Jetty Restoration Trust. Mortlock is meeting with retailers this week to get Red Herring into stores. 'It would be great if it took off and helped raise a lot of money for charity,' he said.
Telegraph
14-02-2025
- Telegraph
Water pistols and fence spikes: The battle to keep cats out of gardens
Exploding Kittens is known – in my house at least – as a fast and furious card game. James Garner, however, decided to make the game a reality. Suki, a pretty little 11-year-old tabby belonging to Garner's neighbour, had a habit of climbing up his bird table. And so this formerly upstanding member of the parish council in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, tried (according to Suki's owner) to blow her up with a birdbox stuffed with explosives. Garner resigned from his parish council post last week after the sordid incident emerged. Poor Suki was left with singed whiskers and possibly a little trauma. Extreme? In the world of cat wars, Garner may have temporarily shot to the top of the list for his innovative approach to cat deterrence, but there are plenty of other anti-feline fans spending a large proportion of their time and effort on keeping the beasts away from their own gardens. 'I've tried most things,' sighs Freddie Harlen, who has had enough of neighbouring cats using his garden as a lavatory; 'pepper, hair [cats supposedly perceive the scent of human hair as a threat], garlic, citrus, marigolds, mothballs. The only things that have worked are small-animal repellent and a motion-activated sprinkler I built so that anything that walks by gets instantly sprayed with water.' 'My garden is now full of plants that cats hate – lavender, oregano, rosemary – although it doesn't seem to have worked that well,' says one green-fingered girlfriend. Another confesses to buying a dog partly to deter the neighbour's big ginger tomcat; one pal's father-in-law keeps tennis balls in his utility room for the express purpose of throwing them at passing moggies, while another irascible parent silently lets his bull terrier loose every time a feline casually appears on the lawn. 'Cats will not pay any attention to our boundaries' A Mumsnet thread on the topic, started by a desperate mother trying to keep her children's sandpit free from cat poo has more than 40 replies, advising everything from installing specialised 'cat-proof' fencing replete with spikes, to keeping watch with a water pistol. My friend Rowan messages me a picture of two lethal-looking electronic devices: ultrasonic deterrents that emit high-pitched sounds only cats can hear, which he swears has done the trick. Perhaps the most outlandish-sounding suggestion comes via my old schoolfriend Anna, whose dad purchases lion poo to spread on his garden, obtainable on Amazon and marketed with the express purpose of keeping cats at bay. 'How to stop cats coming into your garden is the question I get asked the most,' admits feline behaviouralist Lucy Hoile. 'It's tricky. Cats will not pay any attention to our boundaries. They can scale our fences. And I tend to find the commercial deterrents you can buy don't work.' And while the theory that cats won't soil their own territory isn't quite true, 'Why would you poo in your own garden if you had the choice to go in someone else's?' asks Hoile, quite reasonably. The trouble is, you can't take a cat for a walk. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, the cat walks by himself (and poos where he likes). For many feline fans, this independence is why they love their pets (although whether you can actually ever own a cat remains a debatable point). Cats aren't needy like dogs are; they wash themselves; they're quite capable of exploring and returning home when they're ready. And yet, 'people hate them,' says animal behaviourist Zoe Willingham, who has 67 rescue cats of her own. But cats are also clever, opportunistic chancers who can cause rifts between neighbours that makes Leave vs Remain look like a playground spat. And it's not always about keeping a cat out either. Last year a dispute over a Californian cat called Mercury went viral, with Mercury's owner accusing his neighbour of being a 'cat pervert' and holding his pet hostage – all because Mercury quite liked hanging out in the neighbour's yard. In 2020, a couple in Hammersmith, south-west London, waged a legal battle to prevent their neighbour from stealing their Maine Coon Ozzy, after becoming convinced she was taking Ozzy into her home and feeding him. My parents' large and greedy cat Moriarty was much mourned by their neighbours when they moved two years ago: Moriarty had effectively set up a second home at their house, enjoying double his usual number of meals a day and the odd catnap on their outdoor sofa thanks to their largesse. 'The thing with cats is they're very quick learners – if there's food in a house the first time they go in, they will try again,' says Hoile. 'I don't know any way of training a cat not to eat food when it's in front of them. They're only partway domesticated, really.' The same thing applies when it comes to chasing birds and wildlife (if you're a birdwatcher, Hoile advises installing nests and feeders high up in trees or onto a really high bird table that a cat can't get to). Or doing their business. Which is where cat owners also need to make sure they're providing for their pets. 'It's no good saying my cat doesn't need a litter tray and it doesn't wee in my garden – that's not very neighbourly,' Hoile points out. 'A lot of cats prefer a litter tray to going out, but if there's no provision in its owner's home, that's not the cat's fault.' And if you live next door to a cat owner but hate the creatures, 'give some thought to that before you create a giant litter tray in your garden' – i.e. perhaps that sandpit, or nicely gravelled front garden isn't such a good idea after all. Not all cats are so independent – or clever. We once had a half Burmese named Kipling, acquired in part to deal with the mice that plagued our flat, who was nevertheless so dappily stupid that she once spent two days up a tree because she couldn't work out how to get down, and eventually got herself run over because she couldn't work out what direction home was in. 'My neighbour threw my cat's corpse at my feet' Still, having to identify her poor squashed body was probably less traumatic than the experience of one poor anonymous soul seeking retributional advice on one internet forum. 'The relationship between me and my neighbour has drastically deteriorated in the past few months; we fell out because my cat kept going into his garden to do his business,' wrote the heartbroken poster. 'I couldn't control where my cat roamed or c-----d and he's been walking the neighbourhood for nine years, so I didn't do anything. Then yesterday, my neighbour came round and threw my cat's corpse at my feet.' James Garner might have to move down a place in the cat war league tables. Exploding kittens is one thing. A dead cat strategy is entirely another.
