The remarkable story of an arithmetic game -----------------------------------------
An article published in issue 71 of Tangente announced the release of this board game, in which two to four players take turns solving, in under a minute, arithmetic puzzles associated with the square they have landed on. They must either solve a short problem shown on a card or, when the square displays operation symbols, reach a "target number" determined by rolling two red ten-sided dice whose faces bear digits (so the target is between 0 and 99), combining numbers obtained by rolling five polyhedral dice. Mathador's creator first had the idea for the game after discovering dice in the shapes of the five Platonic solids during a game of Dungeons & Dragons (Tactical Studies Rules, 1974)…
Since that first edition, one version has followed another: a Junior version in 2003 (Réseau Canopé, L2D); a Kid version with large dice in 2006 (Réseau Canopé, L2D); Mathador Flash in 2010, a small metal box containing the dice, with rules adapted for classroom use (Réseau Canopé); and the first digital versions in 2014 and 2015, including Mathador Chrono and Mathador Solo (Réseau Canopé). Both remain current and can be played online at **mathador.fr** or as apps for tablets, smartphones and all other devices.
Board game and digital: two complementary recent versions ---------------------------------------------------
2019: for its 20th anniversary, Mathador decided to change its look. The new box marked a genuine shift, with a small revolution in the game board: new squares brought greater variety, while another die introduced random movement. The fundamentals remained unchanged, but all 220 puzzles were new, and the board offered several kinds of arithmetic challenge. Besides reaching the target number as quickly as possible, players might have to find as many different ways of reaching it as they could, or score as many points as possible by constructing it. This was a nod to Mathador Flash, in which each operation earns points: one for addition, one for multiplication, two for subtraction and three for division. You do not divide for fun, but for three points!
Alongside the release of this new box, use of the digital version is booming. In the time it takes to get out the dice, roll them, read and write down the numbers and begin searching, a Mathador Chrono player has already worked through four or five different sets of numbers with just a few mouse clicks. Another strength is that essential arithmetic drills become a game—something that had rather fallen by the wayside for recent generations. “Tedious” and “repetitive” give way to “attractive”! Combinatorics + randomness = sheer delight.
A teaching tool, too --------------------
Learning mathematics through play is becoming increasingly common in primary and middle schools. Mathador is part of this trend. With the Flash version, this practical initiative gradually became a teaching tool for mental arithmetic.
Réseau Canopé, which distributes the Mathador games, sees this clearly from its contacts with schools and the feedback it receives from classes. Year after year, the game is gaining ground. It is now close to being recognized as a fully fledged teaching tool.
Whether through group game workshops or individual challenges, primary schools have gained a head start over secondary education. Over the past 20 years, the growing role of games in schools has gone hand in hand with the rise of mental arithmetic, both in curricula since 2002 and in classroom practice. The number of classes using games such as Mathador as a daily routine is steadily increasing. This practice is also very likely the best antidote to the anxiety that is still associated with learning mathematics. But there is still some way to go before the culture of number games can rival that of word games!
*Éric Trouillot is the creator of Mathador.*