From the makers of Exploding Kittens comes Throw Throw Burrito. It’s a card game that is quite civilized until one of the players picks up a foam burrito and throws it at another player.
It is the fourth card game from former video game maker Elan Lee and digital cartoonist Matt Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal. The family-friendly game has blown past its $10,000 Kickstarter goal in a day and reached $820,000 with 29 days to go in the crowdfunding campaign.
Lee is the former chief creative officer at Xbox, but he quit four years ago to create the tabletop game Exploding Kittens along with Inman. The game raised an unprecedented $8 million via crowdfunding, and to date it has sold more than 8 million copies, Lee said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Inman created the hilarious art for the game and helped promote it on his comics web site, The Oatmeal.
Lee and Inman’s company, also called Exploding Kittens, is at the forefront of the tabletop game renaissance, which is now the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry with the global board games market size expected to reach values of over $12 billion by 2023. The Exploding Kittens game also got a paid mobile version that is also consistently a bestseller.
Their work in tabletops is the exact opposite of the usual migration from a debut on digital platforms and expansion to tabletop, Lee said. Bloomberg ran an article recently about board games becoming Wall Street’s new way of networking.
Exploding Kittens leads sales in the tabletop card game category worldwide, and it still holds the record for the most backed project ever by more than two times through crowdfunding platforms and is among the top-selling toys and games across Amazon, Target, and Walmart.
Designing Throw Throw Burrito
Throw Throw Burrito combines a card game with dodgeball. Players have to concentrate on collecting cards, as you can see in the video on the Kickstarter page. Once they collect three key items, players can start hurling foam burritos at each other. Since it’s so physical — fights can break out as many as eight times per game — it becomes fun to watch the game.
“While our other games had animals, we realized we had to depart from animals,” Lee said. “None of us felt comfortable with throwing an animal. But the most fun for us was throwing food.”
The team tested different objects, and they even took a trip to China to examine materials. The people at the factory seemed quite puzzled at the Americans throwing things at each other for product testing, Lee said.
This kind of game is similar in spirit to Exploding Kittens and the company’s other games, Bears vs. Babies and You’ve Got Crabs. Lee said he wanted to make games that lure people away from their screens and back to each other. The company of 22 people comes up with these games in part by shutting down for four hours to play games.
“For us, the mission is what does the next step in tabletop games look like?” Lee said. “It’s an important theme. What happens when you lure people away from screens push them toward each other. Our games are not designed to be entertaining, but to make the people who play them entertained.”
Kickstarter contributors will get their games in September and a general retail release is targeted for the holidays.