Exploding Kittens creators drop surprise new party game You’ve Got Crabs

How popular is getting Crabs for Valentine’s? Pretty darn popular, as it turns out.

We should clarify: we’re talking about card game You’ve Got Crabs, rather than the actual sea-dwelling crustaceans or any other sort of crab. Not that we can think of any. Nope, none at all.

The latest animal-starring party game from the folks behind Exploding Kittens and Bears vs Babies – and featuring similar comic art from The Oatmeal illustrator Matthew Inman – You’ve Got Crabs was dropped as a surprise reveal on the day of love in the US.

Unlike Kittens and Bears, though, Crabs is skipping Kickstarter completely, with the game immediately available to buy for £20. The catch (see what we did there?) is that there’s only a limited number of the first edition available, with pre-orders for a second edition set to follow in a ‘few months’.

Despite the suggestive name (about shellfish and nothing else), You’ve Got Crabs is billed as a kid-friendly card game about the ocean, based on a traditional playing card game called kemps, among other things.

“We rebuilt kemps from the ground up and fixed the mechanics that were broken, including adding structured teams and rebalancing the card distribution,” the Crabs website says.

The basics are that two teams of two to five people decide on a secret signal and then begin drawing cards, trying to collect a set of four. If a player gets a set, they must slyly signal to their teammates, who then need to shout “You’ve got crabs” at them to score a point. If an opponent twigs the signal first and shouts out the same, the player with the set loses a point instead.

There’s also an expansion for the game that comes with two human-sized crab claws that must be donned by any player holding the imitation crab card. The set costs £15.

In the day since You’ve Got Crabs scuttled onto land, the game has already made more than half a million dollars from nearly 15,000 people – which equates to about 16% of the limited-edition stock. (Which means there’s roughly 89,000 copies available in total, if our maths adds up.)