AFTER A SUCCESSFUL LOCAL RUN, the Barbadian maths board game "Calculink" may be heading overseas.

"We are looking to go overseas through the licensing of the game," said inventor Winston Cumberbatch, chief executive officer of WINCO Games.

The idea is to license the game out to established companies which would do the manufacturing, marketing and sales, and pass on royalties to Barbados, he explained.

"It is one of the things that persons in this industry are usually advised to do because you are able to cover a wider range (of buyers) without having to cover the (production) overheads and you benefit from the royalties," Cumberbatch noted.

"We have been looking at this for a little while and we think the time has come . . . to do that," he said while promoting the game at the trade show BMEX over the weekend at Sherbourne Conference Centre.

"Our objectives would have been to penetrate the international market. We had targets set for that but after we gave it some thought, we decided that we would focus on the licensing of the product and continue to develop new games."

Cumberbatch described local sales of the game as "very good", with last Christmas being "a high point".

"We have been in all the stores in the island and sales have been going very good from all reports," he added.

He won the Prime Minister's Award for Innovation at the National Innovation Competition
in 2004.

Calculink got its name from the words "calculating" and "linking'. The game promotes mental arithmetic through adding, multiplying, subtracting and dividing as varying sums are formed on the board.

It also promotes the mastering of several mathematical skills through the CalcuTest cards.

These offer practical exercises on a range of school-based topics, such as tables, equations, fractions, angles, averages, volumes, areas, measurement, perimeters, percentages and much more.
(TY)