I was an impossible case

How did you learn your times tables? For me, it was a combination of practising them on the walk to school, and listening in the car to a cassette tape. I still remember the tune of the thing—it was the same for every times table, in a different musical style.¹ Maybe, if you’re about my age, you had one of those VTech “computers” for children, that would let you play educational games on a dot-matrix screen.²

Maybe, though, if you were just a little bit older than me—and, in particular, lived in Australia—a part of your learning journey would have been by playing a board game. Maybe it would have been one with over a hundred little cubes, that you could play with up to four of your friends. Maybe, just maybe, it would have been…

Multiplay

When I found Multiplay on a charity shop shelf, I was pretty sure I had another Octogo on my hands. Both are from the decade before I was born; both have weirdly wide-and-flat boxes; both position themselves as intellectual by putting a comparison to chess on the box. They both even came from the same shelf of the same shop in Saltaire.³ I was ready to fall into another rabbit hole about an indie board game company’s heroic but doomed attempts to hit the big time.

No such luck: I’ve really struggled to turn up anything on this game. It was designed, apparently, in Australia, and manufactured in the Philippines, but my searches for it in either of those places, as well as in other English-speaking countries, came up short. I have three theories for why this might be, or which the truth may be some combination:

1. I don’t know what the best sources are for newspapers outwith⁴ the UK. I’m willing to accept the possibility of this, but I have tried a lot of things. So I think that, if there were a lot to find, I would have found at least some of it.
2. Anything useful gets buried because the name of the game is hard to search for. It’s painfully clear that this game wasn’t invented in a time of SEO: so much of what comes up is where the search engine has matched for the word “multiplayer”, or the article is talking about a “multiplay CD player”. Again, I can’t completely rule this out, but I’ve done my best: I’ve read through quite a lot of the results that might be burying it, filtered to the right time period, added extra search terms like “board game” and the name of the designer, and even searched under the game’s alternative name of “Multicube”. Still nothing.
3. The game just didn’t get that much publicity.

If indeed, as I suspect, the answer is mostly 3, then that’s a shame, because Multiplay deserves at least as much coverage as Octogo does.⁵ Allow me, then, to partially correct the record with a review.

The components of Multiplay are, like the words spoken on the steps of St Paul’s, simple and few: a plastic tray (because all games of this era seem to involve a plastic tray), a 12-sided die, and 121 cubes.⁶ Each cube has a number on it, the same on all six faces; the difference between the faces is that each is a different colour. The game starts with the cubes arranged randomly in the tray, but with the white side facing up on each. White is a neutral colour; the other players assign themselves one of the other possible colours. The only function of the cubes is to let you change the colour of the numbers in the grid, to show that a particular player “owns” a given square.

Setting up the game in this way is, as you might imagine, painfully slow. And what makes it worse is that it this was totally avoidable. You could achieve the same thing with a grid of 121 Scrabble-esque tiles, printed with the numbers, and a set of coloured see-through counters for each player—with the added benefit that the game wouldn’t be limited by 3D geometry to five players. Maybe my method would use more plastic, but (as you’ll see) you wouldn’t need a full set of 121 counters for each player, and (as we’ve established) games of this era clearly didn’t care about how much plastic they used.

Anyway, the gameplay. You roll the die, and you turn a cube to match your colour that is in the appropriate times table. (For example, if you rolled a 12, you could turn over 12, 24, and so on, up to 144.) When you make a line of an odd number of cubes⁷ you score points, and you get a bonus cube of your choice (ignoring the die). The same happens if you “block” another player, meaning your cubes are at opposite ends of another player’s row of cubes, that row having an even number of cubes—but you get double points for that, and what’s more your opponent loses the same number of points.⁸ The game ends when you’ve turned over all the cubes, or when “no more scoring moves can be made”.

I’ve glossed over the scoring, because there are three different sets of scoring rules, of increasing complexity. (We played the middle one.) What’s more, the game seems to make no claim that the ones it provides are optimal: under the heading “Devising your own games”, it says “This is perhaps the most exciting part of Multicube.”

Overall, then, this game is like a combination of Connect Four, reversi, and a mental maths test. A winning combination? Well, maybe. I’ve only tried it with two players—because it was hard enough finding one other person to play with me. In that, though, it seemed that blocks were much more important than directly making lines, which I’m not sure was intentional. I would imagine it will be less critical in a game with three or more players, because:

• a line could be cut off by two different other colours, which means there’s no effect on the points; and
• in a two-player game, the points-deduction effect means that a block is effectively worth quadruple points, because the double points are also deducted from your only other opponent.

Beyond that specific, the game had a similar flaw to Octogo’s The Game, in that in became incredibly tedious towards the end, when the only numbers left were multiples of four, seven, and nine, and so any turn that wasn’t one of those was a missed turn.⁹ In fairness, we completely forgot about the bonus cube rule, which meant the game was overall a lot slower, and maybe the free cubes would have led to a more even distribution at the end. I have a defence, though: if I’d come up with this variant deliberately, it would have been—according to the game itself!—“perhaps the most exciting” thing I could have done.

You might be surprised that we needed to roll more fours. Surely, you might think, those would be twice as easy to turn over, because you could also turn them over for a two? Likewise, can’t you use a three for a nine? Ah, no. You see, the game only counts a number as being in the appropriate times table if it is at most 12 times that number. Indeed, you are given a cheat sheet—sorry, “Multiplay Table”—which shows what you can turn over for each roll.

I’m not sure what the point of this is. I suppose a disadvantage of allowing any multiple is that some die rolls are substantially better than others (indeed, a one could be used as effectively a free go). As it is, every possible multiple appears in the grid twice—except for 12, which appears five times—so that, with a twelve-times limit, every roll is approximately as good as any other.¹⁰ I assume that that helps to mitigate the problem we had, which is ending up with specific numbers that are hard to access. But a disadvantage of the way they’ve done it is that they have to give you the “Multiplay Table” so it’s clear what’s allowed and what isn’t, which means it’s less effective at teaching you your times tables—and from the design choices, you’d think that that was more the point of Multiplay than the actual game.

What makes this a little frustrating is that Multiplay has the makings of a good game. Maybe it would be better played according to the actual rules? Maybe it would be even better played with the 12-times cap removed. Because, like I said, it’s a combination of Connect Four, reversi, and a mental maths test—and two of those are classic games that are still fun to play,¹¹ so I can imagine that some combination of these could work very well.

I doubt I’ll ever know, because I’m unlikely to find a second person to playtest it with me. And thus, as far as I’m concerned, this will forever remain Uniplay.

I’ll get my coat.

1. I’m not sure how well this worked as a teaching tool, because, if I hum the tune to myself now, I tend to fill in the words with nonsense like “One times one is one, two times two is two…” ↩︎
2. Another tactic that didn’t work: apparently, I used to get a calculator, put the question into that, and then put the answer back into the “computer”. ↩︎
3. Shout-out to the Age UK shop on Gordon Terrace. I really want to know who keeps donating these; if it’s you, and you happen to read this, please get in touch and tell me how on earth you ended up buying them. ↩︎
4. “Outwith” is a Scottish English word meaning the opposite of “within”. English English historically used “without” for this (as in the City of London’s ward of Farringdon Without), but that leads to obvious ambiguity that “outwith” avoids. ↩︎
5. You may, of course, disagree with me on what level of coverage that is. ↩︎
6. Yeah, alright, 121 cubes isn’t exactly “few”. I meant that there were few different types of component. But, also, I’ve played games with way more than 123 components. ↩︎
7. Three or more, that is. Yes, I know one is an odd number, and a single cube is technically a “line” of one cube. ↩︎
8. The idea is that you are preventing them from getting a scoring row on a later turn with those cubes. It seems that, for it to count as a block, the same colour needs to be at either end of the blocked row, even though from a strategic point of view it doesn’t matter if it’s two different players forming the blockade. Incidentally, you can self-block, with the same effect. ↩︎
9. I assume; the rules don’t actually cover this case. Even if you were supposed to roll again, it would still be a lot of rolling. ↩︎
10. As of the start of the game, 27 of the cubes are accessible if you roll any factor of 12, and 24 are accessible with any other roll. ↩︎
11. Yes, only two. I can’t stand Connect Four. ↩︎