Inventum (2011)

The year is 2450. The players, who represent different universities from around the world, will travel five hundred years back in time to the 20th century, where they will plan and deliver one of the great advances in that century. Each of these advances has some requirements on personnel, materials and funding. During the game players take turns to play cards on the table (while keeping some cards to achieve their secret agendas); the cards played on the table help in meeting the requirements, but as more cards are on the table there are more probabilities of problems arising in the common research (at the end of each turn a number of dice is rolled depending on the number of cards on the table, and the result of the dice roll sometimes forces to remove some cards). After 10 turns, players win if they have reached the requirements, and one of the players will be the top winner if he/she has also reached his/her secret agenda. If the players have not reached the requirements, they collectively lose.

Inventum is a game of collaboration that highlights the role universites play in transferring knowledge to the community at large and hereby contributing to our economic and social well-being.

The game is published with the support of the University of Barcelona and the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera, from an original proposal by Marga Becerra and Mariona Ferrer.