A DIDCOT dad who invented a board game to teach children maths using flesh-eating zombies is back with his next creation.

Matt Tidbury’s new card game Times Square challenges kids to destroy an army of the undead advancing on New York’s famous landmark using their maths skills.

Players are faced with nine zombies at a time, each one with its own number – it might be 36, 49 or 72.

Each person then rolls four dice and manipulates the numbers any way they can – multiplication, addition, subtraction or division – to hit the target.

Mr Tidbury, a teacher who lives in Lydalls Road with wife Amanda, trialled his new game on his target audience last week at his local primary – Manor School.

And judging by the reaction he got, he is on to another winner.

The father-of-three, 52, said: “The kids wouldn’t let me go until school had finished, so instead of spending half an hour I spent two-and-a-half hours playing it. It was good fun and I got some great feedback.”

Chloe Bland, age 10, said: “This is the best maths game in the whole world. It is super fun, educational and… awesome.”

Ben Wright, 11, said “I love this game, I would love to play it as part of our homework. It’s really fun.”

A Year Six teacher at the school said: “It is great to see the children getting so excited about applying their maths skills in such a fun way.”

Mr Tidbury spent the past two years developing Times Square with the help of local teachers and gamers.

But its real origins go back eight years when Mr Tidbury was trying to help his daughter Laura with her maths when she was at Wallingford School.

So he set about creating a board game they could play together that got her practising her number facts, and presented it in a way that she didn’t realise she was doing maths.

That game was City of Zombies, which he finally published to the open market just in time for Christmas 2013.

It sold more than 300 copies in the first three months and won three gold awards at the UK Games Expo in 2014.

Mr Tidbury now spends a lot of time running “zombie maths days” in schools across Oxfordshire.

The game will be available later this month from cityofzombies.com, amazon.com and Eclectic Games in Reading.