“Inventors don’t need to make it funny, they need to make it fun”: In conversation with Thor Ritz, VP of Game Development at Exploding Kittens

Thor, it’s great to catch up. Let’s start at the beginning. Was a career in games always on the cards?
It was not! I come from academia. I was teaching geography at Texas A&M. My wife and I had to decide whether or not we were going to be in the middle of Texas or back in LA where her job was – and we chose LA. That’s when I joined Exploding Kittens.

So the early days of the company?
Yes, there were just six or seven of us back then. It came about because they needed help doing a booth for a convention. I built this big ridiculous fake ‘virtual reality’ experience for the booth – we had people doing weird cat dances with their little virtual reality headset on. I managed to stick around after that because it was around the time Exploding Kittens started making more games. At that point, it was just Elan Lee making games and he needed some help. So my time started from then.

Amazing. Are there elements of your academia days that prove useful in the day-to-day of game development at Exploding Kittens?
Well, my dissertation was on French colonialism in the 1600s and 1700s and I spent all my time in the archives… So from that perspective, I would say no!

Ha! Not yet!
Not yet! But I have always been playing tabletop games. I loved CATAN and Ticket to Ride and seeing elements of geography and maps and area control in games. I’m always fascinated with that. The kind of games that we make – super simple casual party games – don’t really lend themselves to anything too highbrow… But my job does sneakily involve aspects about how to communicate ideas clearly so that people understand what they’re supposed to do when they sit down at the table… So maybe, tangentially, there’s some relevant bits there from my academia days.

Now, Exploding Kittens has a big portfolio of games these days – and there’s a strong, consistent brand tone across the lot. What’s been the key to maintaining that across what is now a broad portfolio of games?
I’m not sure if it’s been easy or hard, but it’s been purposeful. A lot of people think of Exploding Kittens as just a stupid little game of Russian roulette, but once you dive into it, you see that there are ways to get better at it. You can learn strategies that pay off over time. So sticking to games with high player interaction – and a sneaky level of depth – is something we’ve always tried to stick to.

And we’ve done that across different formats. Look at A Game of Cat & Mouth. It’s a little cat catapult game where you’re launching balls at a central piece; it’s a two-player game. It’s really silly, but when we first saw it, our first question was: How do we make sure that there’s different ways to win? So that’s a common thread between all of our games.

As VP of Development, what fills up your days?
We have two gears at Exploding Kittens. One gear is when we’re coming up with new stuff, reviewing games, playing stuff… For me, that’s the most fun part of the job. We’re ideating, revising, playtesting and the coordinating aspect.

The next gear is after line reviews, developing those games to get them publishable. It’s one thing to get something ready to play in the room, but to make something that’s going to be reliably fun over 12, 15, 20 games… That’s the sort of game that you want to have on your shelf. So spending time getting that point takes up about half our year, while the other gear takes up the other half.

And we also spend a lot of time on our instructions – maybe too much time! Hopefully some people notice and appreciate it, because we want our instructions to be as close to someone sitting in the room telling you how to play.

So it’s not a ‘dry’ read?
We want it to read casually, but we want it to cover as many bases as we can. And we want to make sure the visuals really help. And then there’s marketing, right? We have to sell these games to people. One of the things that’s been the biggest change for us is that over the last three or four years, the scales have shifted from most people learning about games from friends or family to social media. Right now, more than 50% of people learn about a game and decide to buy it because they’ve seen it on TikTok or Instagram or another social channel. We’ve worked hard to figure out how to get a 10-second – or maybe three-second – clip of a game that makes it compelling and interesting.

Absolutely. Now, you do a lot of inventor outreach. Before we touch on what you’re looking for, can I ask, are there any common misconceptions you encounter about what people think Exploding Kittens is looking for? Any myths we can dispel!
A lot of people think we want to see the funny; that we want to see the joke… The theme… That we want to see the crazy cats or armadillos or whatever the like weird animal is. But that’s always the first thing we ignore when we see a concept. We’re more interested in the level of player interactions or interesting decisions players have to make. Let’s get that right, and then we can worry about the theme. And theming is actually where we can really add value to a concept.

Great point. You can make it feel like an ‘Exploding Kittens’ game, the inventors just has to worry about showing you an engaging concept.
Whenever I meet a new inventor or someone that hasn’t really spent much time with us, I try to assure them that they don’t need to make it funny, they just need to make it fun.

‘Don’t need to make it funny, just need to make it fun.’ Terrific insight. And what’s fun for Exploding Kittens?
Lots of player interaction, lots of moments to make decisions and a novel play pattern –unique twist on something familiar. Most people want something they can start playing and they kind of already know what they’re doing. A good example of this would be Poetry for Neanderthals. It’s a word guessing game that feels a lot like Taboo.

A lot of people have played Taboo, but the twist here is that instead of having certain words you can’t say, you’ve got to speak in single syllables. It’s Taboo, but single syllables, like Exploding Kittens is ‘Russian roulette in a card game’. Inventors don’t need to necessarily have that kind of tagline nailed down, but if you can do that work for us, we are so grateful.

Absolutely. Can you give us another example of how you boil down a concept into a useful tagline? These are fantastic.
Look at Throw Throw Burrito. You could go on a lengthy explaining about how there’s burritos and there’s cards, but that doesn’t compel anyone! Whereas if I pitch it as ‘a dodgeball card game’, you’re going to capture a lot of people’s attention. They know dodgeball and they know card games, so in way, they feel like they’ve played it before.

Brilliant. And a few of your games have come from first-time inventors, is that right?
Yes. We have a few designers that pitch us regularly, and the benefit there is that they know what we like to see. But many of our most successful games have come from folks not even in the industry. Poetry for Neanderthals came from two Google engineers who just happened to have this fun idea for a game.

Looping back around to theming, can you talk me through a game that people might assume had its theme or name from the start, but actually went on a bit of a journey theme-wise?
One of my favourite examples Hand to Hand Wombat. It’s a social deduction game that involves stacking bricks in a certain order on top of each other. Everyone’s got their eyes closed and one person is a bad wombat. Their job is to prevent you from stacking the bricks in order. Everyone else is a good wombat and they’re trying to do it – but it’s hard to tell who is who, because all you can sense is the people’s hands of people; they can’t see.

We got very far along with that being an abstract block stacking game. We got really close to production before calling it Wombats. It was a real coincidence. The Oatmeal had a comic about wombats and he had an image of wombats who happened to make square poops and stacked them on each other… We were like: ‘Wait a second, we’re stacking square things and wombats stack square things…’ And then there’s the punny title. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the perfect theme a product, but the game ended up being really fun.

Before we wrap up, what fuels your creativity?
I like walking and listening to podcasts; getting outside of the office. We’ve got a small team of designers, but everyone has a different creative process. Have you met Ken Gruhl?

Absolutely, big fan of Ken!
His happy space is just cranking out ideas. His proverbial trash bin fills up very quickly – he’ll have an idea, ‘ah, it’s not right’, crumple it up, throw it in the waste bin. Rinse and repeat, again and again. Whereas another designer on our team, Ian Clayman…

Yes, we interviewed Ian earlier this year about your Survivor game – we’ll pop a link to that here.
Yes! So Ian likes to spend more time on an idea. He likes to get it to the point where it’s playable. It might even take a couple of days to get to the point where it’s ready to try out, so he’s a bit more methodical. Everyone here has a different creative process and it means we’re able to get a lot of ideas to the table.

Great. I have one last question… What’s Exploding Kittens’ most underrated game?
I’ll go for My Parents Might Be Martians? It’s definitely our worst selling kids game! It started as a system for playing Poetry for Neanderthals with your kid. I don’t know if that one will ever take off, but as a parent who is very competitive, I love playing that game.

Nice choice. Thor, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks again!

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