By EBELE ORAKPO

Engr. Stanley Ohanugo, a civil engineering graduate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and presently a pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God, has invented a board game called Precepts Crossword Puzzle, a Bible-based word game. In this chat with Vanguard, Ohanugo said the idea came through his interactions with young people in the course of ministering to them. Excerpts:

ENGR.  Stanley Ohanugo who has been in the ministry since 1997, mostly ministering to young people (teenagers and university undergraduates), said Precepts Crossword was born as a result of the experience he had ministering to young people.

“I discovered that most of them have an inclination for games, whether electronic or hard copy, they just love games so I got the inspiration of using the game medium to also link them to the word of God. That was how Precepts Crossword Puzzle came about. In addition to that, I had done a Bible devotional suitable for young people. The message centres on teens and their needs – whether sexual, moral, whatever.

...the Precepts Crodssword Puzzle

In one of the episodes, I introduced the traditional black and white crossword puzzle and I noticed that a lot of people who were using the devotional appreciated it. It was fun for them so they read the Bible and then come back to answer the questions. That was actually how I got the inkling that it is possible to use the game medium to  connect people to the Bible.”

Features: “Of course if it has to be a Bible puzzle, then one of the things that encourage puzzles is being able to provide answers or else it is no longer a game but a problem that you have created.

Concept of doing dictionary
So I said ok, if we have to play this game and people have to enjoy it, there must be a way they can check whether what they are spelling is right or wrong. That was how the concept of doing a dictionary came. Naturally, we would have said ok, they can check the Bible but if I spell a word from the Bible, how do you know if it is in the Bible, where do you start from?

It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I had to create a dictionary and the first step was to gather the words that are in the Bible so that I can have a list of words I could call the Official Precept Words which are words found in the Bible. Then another challenge that came was: ‘What if somebody is reading King James Version, another, the New International Version, then another, Amplified Version?

There must have to be a common clue book so I  gathered the list of words commonly used by believers from 12 translations of the Bible, put all of them together and used the Encyclopedia and some Bible dictionaries to illustrate them so that the dictionary does not just have a list of words but you can check the meanings of words and in some cases, how they are used in the Bible,” he said.

Continuing, he said: “Another aspect of the creation of the game is doing the spelling board. It is a unique feature and not just in terms of aesthetics but in terms of driving the purpose of the game. The motive of the game is to promote the reading of the Bible in such a way that when you pick tiles at random from the pouch, you are able to form words with the letters you had picked.

So what it does is that it brings back to your memory scriptures or passages that you had read earlier. As you are asking yourself, ‘how do I combine C with E? Something begins to happen in your brain, you begin to recollect certain words that you had seen in the Bible.

Engr. Ohanugo

Having understood that philosophy, I had to play it out on the board. One thing I had in mind was to create a system or a concept of the board that will ensure that a player who has more knowledge of the Bible is always able to win the game, not based on luck but based on his actual familiarity with, and knowledge of the Bible. I created a system where a certain area of the board, the light grey area, permits you to spell any category of words in the Bible.

I then partitioned another part which is the zone of complication in the game. Like I said earlier, a game that does not have complications in areas where you need to show your expertise and skill, defeats the purpose of a game so in order to do that, I created a strip of boxes that permit only words that are exclusive to the Bible, ie names of persons and places mentioned in the Bible.

These are words that actually show that you are a Bible reader, which advances the purpose of the game. I introduced the kingdom squares because every game has a reward so the reward pattern in the game is when you form words, you are able to get some bonus so more bonus is given to players who spell words that are exclusive to the Bible.”

Patentability Right: “An invention is an inspired or a creative work. A work can be created from first principles or it can  be created from an adaptation of an existing work. These are acceptable in patent law because I have a patent for this. It is registered with the Nigerian Copyright Commission and Nigeria is a member of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) so any work that is registered with NCC is recognised worldwide.

It is based on this principle that a parent work can be adapted or modified to create a new work and it is accepted as an invention, provided you have sufficient unique features that differentiate it from the other one and one of those is the dictionary.

You use the English dictionary for scrabble but you use Precepts Dictionary for Precepts game . Also, the board design is different from the scrabble. One other thing I added to this is the Precepts Talent, the yellow coin. That is a reward given to a player who is able to cite Bible reference for the name of a person that is formed on the premium square called Thumin.

So if you spell the name of a person and one of the letters falls on Thumin, if the game requires you to cite the Bible reference, you state the book, the chapter and the verse, if you get it correctly, you get one talent. These are all original concepts; they are not things that you find in any other game. That is what gave it the patentability right,” Ohanugo said.

The inventor stated that he will be glad to go into partnership with anyone interested in promoting God’s work. “This is God’s work, an unconventional evangelical tool, so we are talking about evangelism. Individuals and corporate organisations can support it. The most important thing is that they are working towards one goal which is propagating the gospel of Jesus Christ.”