Marseille (France) (AFP) – The Dutch inventor of hit wooden construction game Kapla, which has entertained children and inspired architects for four decades, has died at the age of 80, his wife told AFP. Tom Van der Bruggen, a former antiques dealer and piano salesman, invented the game of small pine-wood planks that can be used to form buildings or other objects after using them to help design himself a castle in the south of France. Boxes of the game, manufactured and beloved in France where Van der Bruggen lived most of his adult life, have been sold tens of millions of times worldwide in dozens of countries.
“He died on February 14 and had been suffering for a year: he had heart problems and was diabetic,” his wife told AFP. The couple had moved from their home in Monaco to Nice for a time to open the world’s first Kapla gallery in early November. Classical music lover Van der Bruggen described himself as “intense,” stubborn, and a compulsive inventor. Passionate about castles since his childhood and determined to live in one, he hit upon the idea of “Kapla” while building a wooden architectural model for his first major building project in the remote Aveyron region of southern France in the 1970s.
“I discovered that blocks you can buy in a toy store, they’re too bulky to build with,” he told Dutch broadcaster KRO in an interview in 2012. “That’s how I got the idea that if you wanted to make a building toy, you had to do it with planks.” Van der Bruggen spent 16 years constructing his first castle in Aveyron from scratch, living there without electricity for six and growing his own vegetables. After founding Kapla in 1987 — the name comes from the Dutch for “gnome planks” (“kabouter plankjes”), the game took years to spread as Van der Bruggen relied on word-of-mouth rather than advertising.
After moving to Monaco, where his success enabled him to buy a home and a Rolls-Royce, Van der Bruggen developed other ventures including construction game TomTect and upmarket doll’s house company K’Tom. “I invent things, you can’t stop me,” he told the France 3 channel in 2019 while showcasing another of his castles, the medieval chateau d’Excideuil in southwest France.
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