The internet loves kittens, especially exploding ones

Matthew Inman, of The Oatmeal fame, needed only eight minutes to fully fund his Kickstarter campaign for his latest project: Exploding Kittens, "a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats".

On Tuesday, Inman and his team launched the online campaign asking backers for $10K over the period of a month. Within eight minutes, the game had been fully funded. An hour later, the campaign was 1000% funded. Within eight hours, Inman had managed to raise over $1 million. The campaign is still ongoing and has now surpassed the $2 million mark, with 29 days to go.

According to the Kickstarter page, 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. The card game is the brainchild of Elan Lee (Xbox, ARGs), Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), and Shane Small (Xbox, Marvell).

The team admits that manufacturing a card game isn't all that hard (printing some cards and putting them in a box is all pretty straightforward stuff) but fulfillment could be an issue. They have teamed up with Cards Against Humanity to try to overcome it.

The rewards for Kickstarter backers have been kept simple on purpose, to facilitate the distribution process - as with other crowdfunding campaigns, there are different levels of funding but each level will only reward you with a different type of deck of cards for the game. The campaign's success - currently 10,000% funded, and counting - is thanks to The Oatmeal's talent for making things go viral, rather than the attractiveness of the rewards for backers.

Before Inman joined the team, Lee and Small had created a different version of the game, called "Bomb Squad". Instead of exploding kittens, the goal of the game was to avoid getting the bomb card. After Inman joined the team, the game was transformed to include exploding kittens, unicorn pigs, magical enchiladas, and weaponised back-hair, among other things.

The team is expecting to start shipping the decks in July.

No actual kittens were harmed in the creation of the game.