Cat-loving Kickstarter users have coughed up more than $8m for the pleasure of Exploding Kittens, dethroning hackable games console Ouya as the crowdfunding website's most highly funded game of all time.

Exploding Kittens is a comedy card game cooked up by XBox chaps Elan Lee and Shane Small, along with Matthew Inman, the brains behind cartoon site The Oatmeal.

After an intensive fundraising campaign, the trio collected $8.78m from 219,382 backers to launch the game. This breaks the record for the largest ever Kickstarter game project, previously held by hackable Android gaming console Ouya.

According to the blurb on Exploding Kittens' (now closed) Kickstarter page, players "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game."

Play is enhanced by cards that let you "avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck". Such cards include ways of defusing the explosion, including feeding the explosive feline, or confusing it with a laser pointer.

Fans of Exploding Kittens were invited to cough up $20 for the standard deck, or $35 for the NSFW version - which presumably involves more horrible things happening to innocent kitties than in the kid-friendly game.

As we previously reported, Exploding Kittens raised $3m in its first three days. It took just 30 days to nearly treble that sum. ®