Photo by Patrick Hansell for The Lafayette

“Carnival Craze” puts carnival fun into an interactive board game.

What started as a way to pass the time during the COVID-19 pandemic has become a possible business venture for Matthew Moise ’24. His new board game invention, “Carnival Craze,” doesn’t just satisfy the inner child in all of us, but the carnival-lover as well.

“[In 2020] I decided I need to do something with all this energy that I have since I can’t see people and I decided to create,” Moise said. “I’ve always been a creator. I looked around my house for supplies, and growing up with not the most in my house, I learned to make fun with whatever I had.”

With a Ziploc bag, rubber bands and a handful of toothpicks, Moise replicated miniature versions of various carnival games, such as Skee-Ball and ring toss.

“It all worked, it was really fun. And I decided these games were fun, but they all lost their pizzazz after a while,” Moise said. “So, what if I made an entire board game around playing the little mini-games?”

For a while, the concept of a carnival-themed board game was only a passing thought or a fun fact Moise would say when introducing himself. However, Moise realized that an idea wasn’t enough for him; he wanted to make his game a reality.

“I worked with the Dyer Center … and I learned a whole lot, got a little bit of money out and said, ‘developing this can be really fun,'” Moise said. “I found that there are more opportunities outside of the Dyer Center and I figured if I wanted to reach that, I needed to develop a lot more.”

After working with the Dyer Center, Moise found the next step to propel him forward in his inventing journey.

“That’s when I heard about the [EXCEL Scholars Program], where you get a grant from the Dyer Center to live on campus and just develop your game as much as you like,” Moise said. “And I applied, and I got it.”

Over this past summer, Moise prototyped miniature Skee-Ball, ring toss, basketball and mini golf while designing his own rules, game board and packaging.

“In the latest prototype, your placement on the board is synonymous [with] how much currency you have, or how many tickets you have,” Moise said. “And so as you score more tickets by doing well in the game, you advance your position on the board and the goal is to get to the end first by reaching one thousand tickets.”

Jaden Stone ’24 piloted the game during its development over the summer. “We had a lot of fun playing the minigames, and I crushed it at ring toss and Skee-Ball, which was really fun,” Stone said. “[Moise] was super enthusiastic, and I think something he got out of the summer was finding out that he really likes meeting people and making connections.”

In the next five years, Moise hopes he will be able to sell finished versions of “Carnival Craze.”

“I’m getting a Limited Liability Company (LLC) underway, so I’m three-quarters of the way [to] getting that finished and then also kind of working on it part-time after college, possibly full-time,” Moise said.

Although “Carnival Craze” may not be a finished product yet, Moise is driven to be successful.

“I’m an extremely ambitious person,” Moise said. “I truly believe that God has gotten me this far because he really wants to take me further and he wants me to have the biggest positive impact on this world that I can. So, this game is just a step to developing me so that I can eventually do even greater and bigger things.”