This combination of simple gameplay and unique art has established designers Elan Lee and Matthew Inman as leaders in the party game industry. Their company has since launched several other experience-focused games such as Throw Throw Burrito and Let’s Hit Each Other With Fake Swords. I talked with them about the origins of their first big hit and how they’re commemorating ten years of lively gameplay at gatherings across the globe.

The Origins Of Exploding Kittens

"Matt was working on The Oatmeal full-time and I had this idea for a small card game," explained Lee. "I literally wrote it out on a deck of cards, and at the same time decided to leave my job at Microsoft. We ended up renting an Airbnb in Hawaii because everyone was exhausted and needed a break. We were just planning to relax and enjoy our vacation. I remember Matt said, ‘Hey, I heard you have a card game. Here we are. There’s a table. Let’s play.’ At first, I thought we should do it quickly—we weren’t there to play cards or stay inside. We wanted to get outside to go paddle boarding and do all the fun stuff. But the game was actually really fun. Matt immediately said, ‘Let’s play again.’ And we did. Hours passed like that. After that session, he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to make a game. This is really fun. Can we work together on this?’ It happened that fast." “Six months earlier, I had been approached by someone who made board games,” said Inman. “We played his game, which was your typical ‘a(chǎn)ssign a point value to a card’ type thing—this card is worth six, that one is worth one, so six beats one. He took some of my characters and put them on the cards. But it didn’t feel inherently fun. When we played Exploding Kittens, it was completely different—it had no characters, just a deck of cards, and it was fun right from the start. I knew this was the game that would work.”

“At the time, I called the game Bomb Squad because it was basically Russian roulette,” Lee said. “There were bombs. You tried not to get blown up. And Matt said, ‘I want to partner up, but you can’t call it Bomb Squad because honestly, it’s kind of dumb. Bombs are scary, they explode, who cares?’ Then he said something brilliant. He suggested making the thing you fear most more unexpected, like cute, fuzzy little kittens. So we renamed it Exploding Kittens, and in that moment, the game truly came to life. That single sentence captured all of Matt’s genius. And off we went.”

Exploding Kittens 10th Anniversary

This simple card game kept growing. It expanded into major retail chains, added expansions like zombie kittens and a NSFW version for adult-only parties. It even entered the modern equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon with an animated Netflix series that debuted in 2024.

The 10th Anniversary brought a new design challenge: how to keep the original’s simplicity while offering fans something fresh? The solution was a 3D game board that elevates everything—the visuals, the gameplay, and the overall experience.

“How do we create a new game that feels exciting?” Inman asked. “We’ve done so many expansions already. So this felt like a way to reboot and refresh the experience, which I think will be more interesting and fun for people. At least for me, it was fun to design. The tricky part is avoiding the trap of making it longer and bigger, which could bore players because people love Exploding Kittens for its short playtime. That was the main challenge. The second question was, how do we make this stand out? When Exploding Kittens launched, it gave the industry a bit of a shakeup because most card games either had fantasy themes with swords and tunics or were old classics like Accounting: The Board Game. We grew up playing those. Exploding Kittens was a breath of fresh air. So now we asked ourselves, what can we do differently? That’s when the idea of a pop-up game came up.”

“Here’s the goal,” Lee explained. “Okay, so we’ve got our cool blue board. That’s the easy side. You can see the board along the bottom. We tried something new—we flipped it to hellscape mode. We thought, okay, we’re doing all this cool stuff that no one’s ever seen before, so that’s great. What if every space on this board changed? You don’t know how to play yet, but these numbers are good—they tell you how many cards you draw if you land here. There are some exploding kittens too—those are the bad spots; you blow up if you land on them. Watch out, because every single one changes when you flip the board. Now there are way more explosions. All the numbers have dropped except for the ones at the very beginning, which have gone up because we wanted to give early players an advantage. As you play cards to flip the board back and forth, you’re setting traps for others. You’re watching where they are on the board.”

More details about the anniversary edition will be revealed soon. While the game looks ahead, the designers still cherish the place where it all began—and left behind a special reminder.

“I was recently looking through some old photos,” Lee said. “I found one taken after we became partners, after launching on Kickstarter, after it became the most-backed project ever. Then we started a company to make more games. The next year, we returned to that same Airbnb for another short vacation. We brought a professionally produced copy of Exploding Kittens, signed it, and wrote ‘invented here,’ then left it at the Airbnb. It’s one of a kind—only one exists in the world. I don’t know who found it or what they thought, but it’s still in that house somewhere. I wonder what happened to it.”

The above is the detailed content of Celebrate 10 Years Of Blowing Up Your Friends With Exploding Kittens. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!