MadzAbout

We're an innovation company in Antananarivo.

Our main focus is on tools for learning, and games for the table. Both come from the same belief: that people learn and connect best face to face, with something real in their hands.

Two sheets of paper covered in pencil sketches of game pieces, each labelled by hand: bodyguard, watcher, queen, archer. — The first drawings of the pieces: bodyguard, watcher, queen, archer.

01Where it came from

Rebuilt from memory, then changed until it was its own game.

Peg solitaire boards sit on hotel tables across Madagascar. A group of ten-year-olds who had played on them rebuilt one from memory, then kept changing the rules until it stopped being peg solitaire and became a game of its own.

What came out is asymmetric: the Queen holds the centre of a circular board ringed three deep by defenders, and the Robber circles the outer ring taking a defender every time he stops. Neither side gets the other's tools. Every character was then drawn, named, and turned into a piece you can pick up.

Two men crouched over a hand-cut wooden board on a pavement, playing with small black and white discs, while a third man watches from beside them. — A traditional board played on the pavement, on a board cut by hand.

02Why old games

Mindfulness used to be built into the board.

Traditional games are still played in the street here. Katra, a Malagasy mancala counted out in tamarind seeds; Fanorona, played across a patterned board; peg solitaire on a quiet wooden square. No timer and no notifications, just a position and the patience to read it.

Reviving that is the reason the company exists. Not as nostalgia, but because a game played slowly, across a table, does something for attention and for the people sitting at it that a screen does not.

A man painting small game pieces at a workbench in the doorway of a brick workshop, with paint tins beside him and an air compressor on the ground outside. — Pieces being finished at a bench outside Antananarivo.

03How it is made

Two editions, both made here.

The standard edition has a 3D-printed board and pieces, and packs into a raffia bag that keeps the tokens together. The limited edition is a hand-made metal board with hand-painted figurines in a collector's pouch. Very few are made, which is most of why it costs what it costs.

Drawn here: Every character in the game is Mat Li's original artwork, drawn for Ferex and for nothing else.
Finished at the bench: Pieces are painted and finished by hand, one at a time, rather than coming off a line.
Paid properly: We work with local artists and artisans and we pay them properly for it, so the work and the money stay in the creative economy that produced the game.

Two children and an adult talking across a cloth-covered workbench in a Malagasy craft workshop hung with cut-metal ornaments. — Working the pieces out with the craftspeople who make them.

04Who we are

Ed-tech specialists, artisans, instructional designers, and the kids whose idea it was.

The game is worked out across a table with the craftspeople who build it, which is why it changed shape several times before anyone printed anything. If you want to ask us something before you buy, whether about the game, the editions, or an order already placed, a person answers the email.

Inclusivity: Good education and good play should not depend on what a family can pay.
Sustainability: Local artists and artisans, paid properly, using materials that are already here.
Innovation: Old-world craft and new-world technology in the same object.

Ask us something