A custom card game and a facilitated simulation exploring values-based investing for multi-generational family-office executives - making conversations about wealth transition both strategic and human.
Challenge: Engage a skeptical, Type-A room of family-office executives - make wealth, values and succession tangible, not another panel
What we built: Two experiences: Family Matters (a card game on the fictional Rosales family) and the Lucha Innovation Lab (a simulation where you play real fund founder Nacho Arenas)
Scale: The inaugural Catalytic Capital Summit (hosted at UFM, Guatemala) - family-office executives from across Central America
Result: A room that normally checks email leaned in - full engagement even in the post-lunch, end-of-day slot; genuinely strategic conversations about risk, values and legacy
They were the kind of room that checks email through most sessions. Type A, high-achieving, successful enough to have sat through every format going - and skeptical of anything that smelled like a game. Announce "we're going to play something," and you can lose a room like this in the first two minutes.
TBN Americas exists to bridge the finance gap between impact investors and entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean. They were launching the Catalytic Capital Academy - and it kicked off with the first-ever Catalytic Capital Summit, hosted by Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala, bringing together family-office executives from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and beyond: multi-generational wealth holders, impact investors, fund managers.
They needed more than keynotes and panels. Impact-investing decisions are shaped by family dynamics, generational tension, and unspoken values - and you can't lecture people into understanding those forces. They have to feel them. The brief: design sessions that engage a skeptical, high-achieving crowd, make abstract concepts tangible, and create space for difficult conversations about succession, risk, and legacy - without anything that felt gimmicky, because this audience wouldn't tolerate it.
So we designed two distinct experiences: one to help participants understand their own family systems through a fictional lens, and one to give them access to how a real impact investor thinks through real dilemmas.
A 75-minute card-based experience centered on the fictional Rosales family, a Latin American family office in transition: the matriarch stepping back, the third generation stepping in, old money meeting new ideas about impact.
We knew a game on its own would trigger skepticism, so we didn't announce one. We opened cold - a 60-second video introducing the Rosales family, voiced in the style of an old corporate documentary, using assets that matched the game's visual identity. Participants didn't know what was coming; the surprise did the work.
Three ten-minute rounds, each with clear objectives, competition and collaboration both baked in. Physical materials in manila envelopes created ritual and tactile engagement - people opening, distributing, spreading cards across tables. We brought in external judges, including Monica from TBN, who had deep credibility with the group; when the judges took their role seriously, the teams matched that energy. The serious-fun calibration worked. Participants weren't playing a game - they were rehearsing decisions they might actually have to make. The characters triggered pattern matching: "I know someone just like this."
The second experience was a 90-minute scenario simulation. Participants stepped into the role of Nacho Arenas, co-founder of Lucha, a real catalytic-capital fund based in Lima. His calendar is overbooked. Five pressing decisions are waiting. Teams can only address three.
We built the scenarios from actual situations Nacho had faced: a struggling founder asking for support, three early-stage founders competing for limited capital, a co-investment with a brilliant but difficult founder, team burnout signals, a keynote that needed the right framing. Each came with voice notes, Slack threads, and founder personality cards - rich context that could be skimmed in a minute or studied for thirty. Both were valid.
Then the reveal: Nacho himself appeared to share what he actually chose, and why - not just answers, but his reasoning, his trade-offs, the context that shaped each call. You can't get that from a podcast. You have to feel the decision pressure first, then hear how someone with real stakes thought it through.
We had a moment of terror before the session, when Nacho sat silently for what felt like an hour, reading the materials we'd built. We thought we'd gotten it completely wrong. Then he said: "I think it's this one, but it's hard because..." That's when we knew we'd hit the right level of complexity. If the founder himself had to sit and think, we'd built it right.
The skeptical, Type-A crowd opted in. People who normally check email through sessions were leaning in, debating, laughing. Even the end-of-day slot - post-lunch, after two back-to-back keynotes - held full engagement.
More importantly, the conversations that emerged were genuinely strategic. Participants weren't giving surface-level responses; they were wrestling with real tensions around risk, values, and legacy. The fictional frame gave them permission to say what they really thought about impact investing and generational dynamics - the things that are hard to say directly across a boardroom table.
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