PARTY ANIMALS
Two years after Exploding Kittens blew up Kickstarter, designer Elan Lee and artist Matthew Inman are back with Bears vs Babies. We caught up with Lee to see how their small game of comedy cats turned into all out teddy-tot war
Words by Matt Jarvis
At the beginning of 2015, a small card game starring extremely volatile felines popped up on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.
The brainchild of former Xbox video game developers Elan Lee and Shane Small, and illustrated by Matthew Inman – better known as the creator of hugely popular web comic The Oatmeal – Exploding Kittens was essentially Russian roulette with cards. Players drew a series of ridiculous cat types (including tacocat, overweight bikini cat and hairy potato cat – we can’t decide which is most disturbing) and actions allowing them to look at the central deck, avoid drawing or force other players to pick up extra cards. When a kitten was revealed, wielding incendiaries that would make Wile E. Coyote’s eyes water, that player had to find a way of defusing it (catnip sandwiches, kitten therapy and laser points all effective) or they blew up along with the moggy, eliminating them from the game. You wouldn’t guess it from the absurd feline theme it ended up with, but the game started off as something far tamer.
“Matt and I have some friends in common so we end up in the same room a lot,” Lee answers when asked how the trio behind the title came to be. “When I resigned from Xbox, I started working on a new game design called Bomb Squad with my friend Shane Small. I had been working on the game for a few weeks and carried a deck with me everywhere I went. I would often steal any spare moments my friends would tolerate to test and retest the ruleset.”
Equipped with nearly two decades of experience working on video games and movies – including heading up the creation of The Beast, the alternate reality game used to promote Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Lee was clearly no stranger to creating unique ways of playing. What he needed to complete the package was a killer hook. Enter Matthew Inman, the final part of the trinity, and the theme that would rocket Bomb Squad to multi-million-dollar success.
“Matt had heard about Bomb Squad and asked if he could play,” Lee recounts. “I told him we could certainly find better things to do than play a silly prototype, but he insisted and I agreed to show him the game for five minutes before we went out to dinner. Those five minutes turned into ten, and those ten turned into an hour. When three hours had passed, and we were all starving, we agreed to take a break and play again the next night. This turned into a ritual for the next week. It was the most flattering playtest result I could imagine.