Warren man seeks funds for educational app game through kickstarter campaign

By Bruce Walton | February 22, 2017 at 12:05a.m.

Warren inventor launches Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for educational mobile app

WARREN

It’s taken Matthew Anderson nearly a decade of development to create a game that’s as educational as it is addictive. And he’s finally crunched the numbers to make it a reality.

Anderson has been reaching out to schools, organizations, businesses and individuals before the initial launch of this product to create a mobile app game with the help of Kickstarter.

The game, Numbered Out, is a number-puzzle game that can host from one to seven people of all ages, much like a combination of Scrabble and Sudoku.

Numbered Out consists of a grid of round indents and an assortment of labeled disks with numbers from zero to nine. On each turn, a player strategically places a disk on the board to get the highest score possible matching numbers in numerical order.

There are some limits, however. No more than seven sequential disks and no more than six of the same number in each group can be on the board. The score also can increase depending on how many groups the player’s disk belongs to.

“I don’t think that this is the greatest thing ever, but this is the next biggest thing next to Monopoly,” he said.

The General Motors autoworker first got the idea for the game when he heard his sister, a teacher, talk about how her students struggled with math.

As a lover of Scrabble and gin rummy, Anderson thought of creating a game that could be just as easy to learn, was challenging to master and teaches people mathematics. He made a wooden prototype to demonstrate to his sister’s class, and the students loved it, Anderson said. His sister still has a copy of the game in her class.

Unfortunately, Anderson said he found it would be almost impossible to sell Numbered Out as a board game because of the competitiveness of the board-game market. Instead he decided to develop it into an app game.

Anderson said the app would let him release his game a lot faster and with less red tape. His new hurdle is getting enough money to develop it. He already has a developer standing by to take on the job, but he needs money to pay them and get the app online. So, he opened a Kickstarter campaign last month and has raised about $1,000 of his $35,000 goal.

For now, he’s been searching to raise money or find an investor willing to give him a chance to get his game off the ground.

Right now he said, it’s all about “grinding and hoping.”

Anderson’s Kickstarter page is located at www.kickstarter.com/projects/881293665/numbered-out-mobile-app-game?ref=discovery