'Exploding Kittens' Kickstarter Campaign Ends With a Bang

It's not every day you can brag about besting LeVar Burton at, well, anything. But the team behind Kickstarter's most backed project of all time have earned that right.

The Exploding Kittens card game closed its campaign Thursday with a whopping 219,382 backers—more than double the previous record of 105,857, held by Burton's Reading-Rainbow project since last summer.

But Elan Lee, Shane Small, and The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman have even more to celebrate: Exploding Kittens is also the most funded game-related project ever, raising $8,782,571.

Overall, Exploding Kittens is the third most funded project in Kickstarter history behind the Pebble smartwatch and Coolest Cooler.

"We've never seen anything like you guys, and neither has the planet," the creators said in a message to its supporters. "You have proven beyond any doubt that you are unstoppable. There's nothing we can put in front of you that you can't do. There is nothing too great, nothing too hard, nothing too outrageous that you incredible group of incredible people can't accomplish as a community."

The card game—a strategic version of Russian Roulette for people "who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats"—surpassed its $10,000 funding goal in its first 20 minutes.

Those who pledged $20 or more will soon get to take turns drawing cards, until someone picks an exploding kitten, and, obviously, loses the game. Unless you have a critical defuse card, which creatively saves your life and the cat. Or you can play various cards to skip your turn, attack other players, peek at the deck, or secretly relocate an exploding kitten card.

The two-to-four-player game is recommended for ages seven and up.

"In the last 30 days, you've broken a lot of records," the Exploding Kittens team wrote in a project update. "But we wanted to highlight our favorite one: You made this the most fun Kickstarter to run of all time."

Inman knows a bit about fundraising: The cartoonist earned more than $1 million to help build a Tesla Museum in New York.

But not every Kickstarter project is a gem. Check out some weird ones in the slideshow above.