Vital Lacerda’s latest luxury worker placement game races past $550,000 on Kickstarter

Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, the latest heavy eurogame from On Mars and Kanban EV creator Vital Lacerda, has soared past $550,000 for its Kickstarter campaign after just four days of fundraising.

The game is the most recent in a long line of plush, complex worker placement games from Lacerda and artist Ian O’Toole, who have become major names in the board game industry since the breakout success of their debut game together, 2015’s The Gallerist.

Inventions is now about halfway to reaching the roughly $1.1m raised for Lacerda and O’Toole’s previous release, Weather Machine, which was kickstarted at the very end of 2021.

Almost 5,000 backers have pledged for Kickstarter copies of Inventions so far, with 20 days of the campaign left to go. Weather Machine picked up commitments from just over 9,100 backers for its campaign.

Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games, which has been working with Lacerda and O’Toole since The Gallerist, has stuck with the $129 price point of Weather Machine for the new game’s Kickstarter edition.

That is up from the $99 base pledge for Kanban EV in 2020 and $89 for On Mars from a year earlier.

Lacerda is also currently working on House of Fado, which is centred around restaurants playing traditional Portuguese music.

That game will be his second faster-paced offering designed alongside João Quintela Martins, following this year’s release of Bot Factory.