Designer Spotlight: Vital Lacerda — The Architect of Beautiful Complexity
There’s a moment in every Vital Lacerda game — usually about 40 minutes in, halfway through someone’s first teach — where a player’s eyes go glassy. The mechanisms are piling up. The action spaces connect to the resource tracks which connect to the scoring conditions which connect to the timeline which connects back to the action spaces. It feels like too much. And then, sometime around turn three, something clicks. The interlocking gears suddenly make sense. You don’t just see what you can do — you see why every mechanism exists, why it had to be that way, why removing any single piece would collapse the whole structure. That’s the Lacerda moment. And once you’ve felt it, you’ll chase it forever. ...
