Multiply

Android, for children aged 7 to 10

Times tables become magic spells.

An adventure game where every multiplication is a spell. Naomi has just been given her father's magic amulet and is starting lessons with the old Wizard when dark forces capture her mother. To bring her home, she has to master the most powerful magic there is: multiplication. A child who would rather play a boy plays Swan instead.

Get it on Google Play How it teaches

The whole adventure is free. No ads, no account, and nothing leaves the device.

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A real adventure, with the tables inside it

Fourteen scenes, from the Wizard's hill to a cursed mine, a frozen island and a prison. The story moves forward through dialogue: characters ask for help, a quest log keeps track of what is left to do, and some passages stay closed until whoever guards them has been beaten in a magic duel, or won over with a riddle or a game.

The people Naomi meets are funny and kind rather than scary: Granny Pippin and her ticklish apple tree, pacifist golems, a grumpy ghost, a bat boss who only wants to sleep. Every line is voiced, in English, French and Spanish, so a child who is not yet a fast reader still follows the story.

There are trolls, skeletons, yetis, wolves and ghosts to face, sometimes three at once. Nobody in this world carries a weapon. The only power is magic, and the magic is multiplication.

Naomi in a cave corridor, an old golem filling the way, and her line at the foot of the screen

Learning by playing

Knowing the times tables means having sixty-four facts ready at once, from 2 × 2 to 9 × 9. Getting there takes a great deal of practice, and practice is exactly where children lose interest: a worksheet asks the same kind of question, the same way, for a reason that belongs to the adults.

Multiply keeps the practice and changes the reason. A multiplication wins a duel, fills a cauldron, gets a golem to step aside, opens the way to the next scene. The child is not doing sums to get to the end of the sums. They are doing them to find out what happens next.

Recall

Every answer is a spell

In a duel, the enemy announces its power and how many times it will strike: six blows of 6, say. Type 36 before the time runs out and the shield holds. Then it is Naomi's turn, and the game turns the question round: it names a blow, 24, and she builds it from her own powers, ×6 four times or ×8 three times. Any right way counts, and the magic orbs fly. A wrong answer is never left standing: the right one smashes it on screen.

So a single fight asks for the product one way and for its factors the other. In the first scenes, each attack is first shown as a dream, the enemy's orbs fired and counted one by one, so the child sees what six blows of 4 means before answering. Later the dream goes, and the answer has to come as a reflex.

The powers arrive one at a time, from ×2 to ×9, as the story goes on. Each new one is practised in the scenes that follow it, and the older ones keep coming back alongside it.

A duel in the snow against three enemies: 6 × 6 = 36, right answer

Understanding

One fact, seen from every side

A fight asks for a fact. The riddles and mini-games ask what the fact means. At the baker's table, three children must get the same number of apples, and sharing them out turns into 3 × ? = 6: a division, without anyone saying the word. At the Wizard's cauldron, a staff doubles and a lid halves, so ×4 becomes doubling twice.

Elsewhere, the same tables turn up as stepping stones to jump in twos and threes, bundles of logs that add up to a product, and rows of sleeping bats to count before the light goes out. Each one is a different door into the same sixty-four facts.

The mini-games one by one, and what each one practises

The baker's table: three plates, six apples, 3 × ? = 6

The Wizard's cauldron: 6 × 4, with a lid that halves and a staff that doubles

Practice that adapts

The hard ones come back

Behind the story, the game keeps a note of every operation the child answers, and it counts 7 × 8 and 8 × 7 as two different things, because for a child they are. In the duels, an operation answered wrongly, or slowly, gains weight and comes back more often. Each quick right answer halves that weight, so a fact that has settled steps aside and leaves room for the others.

Nobody has to set this up. The child simply finds that the duels keep asking what they found hard, until it stops being hard.

The grid of all sixty-four operations, mastered in green and shaky in orange, and the ones to practise

What is in the game

The whole adventure, free from beginning to end, with nothing to unlock in the story and no advertising anywhere.

Why I made it

Tables 2 to 9, one power at a time

Each new table is earned in the story, and practised in the scenes that follow.
29 riddles and 11 mini-games

Sharing food fairly, brewing a potion, counting sleeping bats, loading logs for the giants, steering a boat between the rocks.
Magic duels

Trolls, skeletons, yetis, wolves and ghosts, sometimes three at once.
Voiced from start to finish

Every line spoken, in English, French and Spanish.
Naomi or Swan

The same adventure, told for a heroine or for a hero, as your child prefers.
No weapons, no ads, no account

Only magic in the story, nothing to sign up for, and nothing that leaves the phone or tablet.

For parents

A single, one-time purchase unlocks the Parents' corner. There is no subscription, and the adventure stays whole without it.

Several children on the same phone or tablet, each with their own profile, progress and statistics.
Which operations are mastered and which are still shaky, table by table, and play time over the last seven days.
Quick modes outside the story: a Speed Battle with the powers and difficulty you choose, and every riddle and mini-game playable on its own.
Targeted practice on the shaky operations: a Speed Battle and a practice mini-game aimed at them, and a star on the riddles that contain them.
Speed Battles against two or three enemies.
More time to answer, for a child who needs it.
Move your child back to the start of any scene they have already reached.

Everything stays on the device: no account, no server, no advertising and no audience analytics. The purchase goes through the store. Privacy policy · Terms of use