Exploding Kittens Acquires Happy Salmon

Exploding Kittens are well known in the industry for their party games, from the record breaking titular game, to a whole range of over ten others, from Poetry for Neaderthals to a Game of Cat and Mouth and beyond. It has now acquired its first external game, with Happy Salmon.

The game has been published by North Star games, designed by Quinten Wier, and Ken Gruhl, who has since joined the Exploding Kittens team as a Senior Game Designer. The Intention is to reimagine Happy Salmon, but with the typical and stand out Exploding Kitten's twist, in time for a November release.

“While we’ve spent so many years building an incredible pipeline for games, we know the best ideas don’t always come from within our four walls,” said Zach Schiff-Abrams, Head of Creative Development, Exploding Kittens. “We want to develop new games and brands, whether that’s through our internal team, working with external designers, or by acquiring IP and talent like we did with Happy Salmon.” 

This is the first time Exploding Kittens have reached outside of their own brand, though they recently released Exploding Minions, a version of their own game, but with popular images of Minions from the film series Despicable Me. 

Happy Salmon was described in our recent Top 50 Party Games feature as being " is the sort of frantic, no-turns shouty jumpy party game that feels as though it always existed in children’s parties of your past but didn’t", and indeed it ranked at number 39 in the list itself, with the original Exploding Kittens game at number 50. You can read the full article here!

If you're wanting to see more of Exploding Kittens Games, check out our review below of Tacocat Spelled Backwards: