(NC) -- You know how sometimes while going about your daily
business you're suddenly blessed with a moment of inspiration? A great
idea comes to you from out of nowhere, you tell yourself you'll write it
down, inevitably don't, and later when you're trying to remember this
grand idea you had, it's completely vanished from your psyche. Well,
Francois Robillard is a perfect example of why you should stop and make
more than just a mental note of these flashes of brilliance.

In the 1980s, Robillard, a Montreal-based college
professor, was up at his cottage one night enjoying a drink, doodling
with a few math equations for fun, when the Eureka moment that birthed
Mathable, a board game that's since gone on to sell hundreds of
thousands of units worldwide, abruptly popped in to his head. “I started
playing it with my wife, altering it here and there, and by the end of
the night I'd created this highly addictive math game,” he recalls. “It
was simple as that.”

Before you could say “two plus two equals four”,
Robillard had licensed his game to a local toy manufacturer and over the
course of the next two decades it became a must have item for
people all over the world. “It was super easy game to sell,” he
explains. “Everybody immediately recognized just how much fun it was—and
it is great exercise for the brain, really educational.”

To play the original board game, think of Scrabble,
but using numbers instead of letters. The new game challenges players to
use basic math equations to score points using the numbers provided to
them throughout the game. You need to employ superior logic and strategy
to win.

Now an app

A recent partnership between Robillard and Montreal's
Wooky Entertainment, has now produced a version of Mathable for your
Ipad. Downloadable from iTunes, the digital version of the game has
many new features.

Variations of the app game—like MathableDominos,
which uses domino tiles, and MathableQuattro, which provides cards for
game play—let players compete from a distance or play alone if they'd
like. And, Mathable Jr enables kids as young as five to play and develop
their logic and math skills in a fresh, new way.