Exploding Kittens creators return to Kickstarter with new party game Hand-to-Hand Wombat
Marsupial-in pledge.
The makers of Exploding Kittens are back on Kickstarter with their latest animal-themed party game, Hand-to-Hand Wombat.
Following in the wake of Exploding Kittens, Bears vs. Babies and the food-themed Throw Throw Burrito, Hand-to-Hand Wombat is billed as a blend of brick-stacking dexterity game á la Jenga (albeit in reverse) and social deduction game in the vein of Werewolf.
The game’s three to six players are secretly divided into two teams, with most of the players trying to build towers of plastic bricks on spindles. One player is secretly a bad wombat who must sabotage the towers, potentially joined by a ‘confused’ wombat who swaps allegiances to the bad team once the good wombats score two of the three points needed to win.
The wombats on the good team can each have additional gameplay challenges to complicate things, including restrictions on removing bricks from towers, taking blocks out of the box and adding levels to each tower.
At the end of each round, the respective teams score either one or two points for two or three complete/incomplete towers, with the first to three claiming victory. The whole game is estimated to take around 15 minutes to play.
As with Exploding Kittens’ previous games, artwork comes courtesy of Matthew Inman, based on Inman’s comic strip about wombats, ‘We Need to Talk About Wombats’, published via online comic site The Oatmeal. A physical booklet of the comic strip will be included with the upcoming board game.
Hand-to-Hand Wombat is live on Kickstarter now, with a full release date to be confirmed.
Exploding Kittens recently announced that it would release NFTs based on its remake of party game Happy Salmon, despite the many ethical and environmental concerns surrounding NFTs and the blockchain technology that powers them. Kickstarter, for its part, plans its own move to the blockchain later this year - despite vocal criticism from tabletop creators that use the crowdfunding site.