On September 19, 2026, our Maria Chiara together with David Spada (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/93322/david-spada), gave a talk at the Kangourou Mathematics Finals in Cesenatico, Italy.

The finals, organized by Kangourou Italia (https://www.kangourou.it/), took place from September 18 to 20 and brought together students from across Italy for mathematical challenges and activities.

Their talk, “I giochi da tavolo, la loro matematica e il loro valore nella formazione” (Board games, their mathematics and their value in education), explored the connections between mathematics, cognitive processes, and board games.

One of the games they discussed was Foxy, a memory and counting game by David Spada that hides some interesting mathematics.

In Foxy, players must estimate how many animals of each type have appeared and decide how much to risk when writing down a number. The higher the number, the more points they can earn, but exceeding the actual count means scoring zero.

Although the rules are simple, the decision becomes more challenging when players need to keep track of multiple animal types simultaneously.

Mathematically, these situations can be represented as points on a line, in a plane, or in three-dimensional space, depending on whether one, two, or three quantities must be tracked.

These representations also allow us to visualize how increasing the chosen number by just one excludes different numbers of possible configurations.

As the number of dimensions grows, a small change in the player's choice can affect more configurations.

The aim is not to introduce mathematical complexity into a simple game, but to use mathematics to describe and make visible a complexity that players have already experienced intuitively.

This is one of the ideas we love exploring at Math for Game Designers: mathematics can help us develop games, but also understand what we experience while playing them!

We'll share more about the mathematics behind Foxy in an upcoming post on our Instagram page.

A big thank you to Kangourou Italia for the opportunity to share our passion for mathematics and games!