A devlog by Neeraj Kotwani, who builds every game on Elipar.
BODMAS Blitz asks you to evaluate an expression — brackets, orders, division and multiplication, then addition and subtraction — and pick the answer. It sits in the Education category alongside a timed arithmetic quiz and a timed flag quiz.
It is not timed, and that is the first decision worth explaining.
Untimed, with a session cap instead
Every other quiz game here has a per-question clock that shrinks as your streak climbs. It works well, and it is wrong for this one.
The point of this game is the breakdown panel that appears after you answer: the real step-by-step working, every time, whether you were right or not. Multiply first, then add. Brackets before anything. That panel is the entire reason the game exists — and a panel you are reading while a clock ticks is a panel you skip.
So there is no question timer. What there is instead is a session cap of one hour, which ends the run gracefully with whatever score is banked, exactly as running out of lives does. That is not a difficulty mechanic, it is a ceiling on a tab left open indefinitely — and it matters that it ends the run between questions rather than cutting one off mid-answer.
Even the music is quieter and slower than the other games'. A driving bassline is right for a reflex game and actively unhelpful when the thing you are doing is reading an explanation.
Hand-built templates, not a random expression generator
The obvious way to build this is a generic expression generator: pick some operators, pick some numbers, evaluate correctly, then produce three wrong answers by perturbing the result.
That gives you a working game and a useless one, for one reason: the wrong answers mean nothing. If the answer is 38 and the options are 31, 38, 44 and 52, then getting it wrong tells you only that you got it wrong. There is nothing to explain.
Instead every expression comes from a hand-built template that computes both the correct answer and the answer you get by making a specific, named mistake.
Take a + b × c. The correct value is a + (b × c). The wrong option is (a + b) × c — which is not a random number, it is exactly what you get if you evaluate strictly left to right and ignore precedence. That is the BODMAS mistake, and it is the whole thing the game is teaching against.
The templates cover the real misconceptions one at a time: ignoring precedence, ignoring brackets, and the classic belief that squaring means multiplying by two. Each template ships with its own step list, so the breakdown explains that particular expression rather than reciting the acronym.
That mapping is the thing a generic generator cannot have. A distractor that corresponds to a real error turns a wrong answer into a diagnosis — you did not just miss, you did this, and here is what to do instead. It costs more to write a template per pattern than one generator. It is the difference between a quiz and a teaching tool.
Tiers, and colour-coded operators
Templates carry a tier, so the expressions start at two operations with no brackets and work up. A player who has not yet internalised precedence does not need brackets and orders in the same breath.
The displayed expression is also marked up per operator class — brackets, orders, division and multiplication, addition and subtraction each get their own colour. That is a small thing that does real work: it makes the structure of the expression visible before you start computing, so the question becomes "which colour goes first" rather than a wall of symbols. It also means the breakdown panel's steps can refer to the same colours the expression used.
What this cannot claim
Worth being straight about the limits, since this is the game on the site with the most explicit teaching ambition.
It has a fixed set of templates, so a determined player will see the same shapes repeatedly — the numbers are random within each template but the patterns are finite. It covers the misconceptions I could name, which is not all of them. And a browser mini-game with three lives is not a curriculum; it is a few minutes of practice with the working shown.
What it does do is make every wrong answer informative instead of arbitrary, which is a low bar that most multiple-choice quizzes do not clear.
BODMAS Blitz is free in a browser, no account, no download, no timer on the explanation.