About SPEDOH!

Midwest Origins

Way back in 2011, I had departed Kansas City, Kansas, while driving home from Springfield,Missouri to Denver, Colorado. For those of you who have never made the trip across the Great Plains of North America, it's extremely desolate, towns are great distances apart, and there's next to nothing to see other than the expanse of grasslands and a slight bend in the road near the horizon. As I splashed through the endless parade of mirages, I had an odd thought, "What if I could create a game like BINGO, but the player gets to put the random numbers where they work best for them? How would that work?"

But why do people love BINGO? Because they can win prizes.

But they have to pay, so it's kind of like gambling. So, make the game free.

I hadn't even started to create the game and I was already thinking of ways to motivate people to play. I remembered something that Dale Carnegie, a pioneer of self-help and motivation, once said, "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity". I took this to justify my thought that the prize does not have to be anything greater than global recognition.

Back to the game. I would use a grid of six squares by six squares. Random numbers would be between 0 and 100. As each number came up, the player could place it anywhere on the board. The object would be to place six numbers in sequence from small to large to score points. In a six by six grid, there are six rows and six columns and two diagonals. So, a perfect board would have 14 sequences of six numbers in a row from smallest to largest. It seemed like a simple enough concept.

It seemed to me that the scoring would be the most complicated process. How to make the game challenging, competitive and exciting to play. There was also a second problem that haunted me for about five hundred miles, I didn't know the first thing about coding. I could think of the game, play it in my head, but building it, well, that was another story entirely.