Erika Barris

In our game version, players have hands of cards and they're offering each other deals, trying to get the best cards.

But they can trick their friends into accepting terrible cards because asymmetric information.

You only ever have to show part of the deal.

Yeah, we think an exploding kittens party game gives us the best chance of sneaking into that world.

And in our previous episodes, we faced our first huge test.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Erika Barris.

Yeah, we have taken this gamble to make a mass appeal game instead of a complex, nerdy learning game.

And today, the stakes...

We are surprised to learn how unscientific that process can be.

What really was the Planet Money game?

We had a prototype and we'd collectively done thousands of hours of playtesting, which you all helped us with.

Thank you very much.

But really, all we had to show for it was a set of rules.

But apparently, this is how Exploding Kittens works.

During the prototyping phase, they seemed 0% concerned with the theme of our game.

Like, they didn't worry about the pictures on the cards, about whether our players should imagine they were used car sellers or fruit vendors running a literal market for lemons.

That is Exploding Kittens co-founder Alon Lee and the rest of the team.

And this was the big one.

The meeting where we finally start looking at names and themes for the Planet Money game.