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Why we made a “math” game!

Hello everyone!

Hope you are all doing well. Way back in 2012 we had an idea and that idea brought us to this point. It’s crazy what one idea can lead to. The idea was for a number game. This call came about because we were travelling with good friends. Disclaimer: we are complete nerds. We were playing all sorts of games….Boggle, Bananagrams, Scrabble. When we arrived back in Toronto, I was jet-lagged and couldn’t fall asleep. I was thinking about all the fun we had had travelling and playing these games and wondered why none of them involved number play.

Stroke of Insight

I woke up my husband so excited about this game I had made up in my head. As it was 2am….he was not as keen as I was so I tried to keep my excitement until the morning! The next morning, I told Mark all about Mobi. How gameplay would work, what the packaging would be like, how much fun it would be…..He was intrigued but not sure. How could this not exist?

Prototype

I got to work and asked our contractor friend Tomas to cut little wood tiles for me. I then painted these tiles and drew numbers on them. Game on right? Nope – the game was TERRIBLE! It was extremely hard to play. I didn’t have numbers right or the number of tiles right. I also had way too many division/multiplication tiles and way too few plus/minus tiles.

Back to the drawing board I went…..and then…..Mobi started to be fun. We couldn’t stop playing! There must be a game like this we though. So we went to all the toy stores and found nothing. We hounded the internet, and nothing! Crazy. Now we HAD to do this!

Mass Production

Finding a manufacturer was the next step. Googling “boardgame manufacturer” provided us with our first manufacturer. We are happy to say, we are now on our 3^rd and most lovely manufacturer! (to read between the lines – we had A LOT of quality control issues with our first two manufacturers which lead us to have to hire university students to sort through 22 thousand sets of Mobi to separate the “good tiles” from the “bad tiles”.)  We survived to tell the tale though and are so pleased to be on this journey!

Onward we go!

Once we designed and launched Mobi, many parents were writing us saying that they loved Mobi but had little kids and wanted a game for the younger generation. Between idea and launch we had also had our first child, Noah. We knew we wanted a version of the game that we could play with him when ready…and Mobi Kids was born. 

Since inception, we’ve developed 5 games and 3 infant/toddler toys. We love the journey. Watching what our kids gravitate to has provided so much inspiration for what we design. We’ve got a number of new projects in the works and literally can’t believe that we get to make toys and games for a living!

Mobi products are now sold all over the world. We can’t believe what can happen in 5 short years. A huge thank you for coming on this amazing ride with us! Can’t wait to show you what we have in the works!