The Best Board Games Secretly Teaching Kids Math

Nearly all board games have something to teach your kids — especially when it comes to math.

The Best Board Games Secretly Teaching Kids Math

I’ll never forget the day I told my mother to take away all the video games for my Commodore 64 that were educational. Keep the laser guns and leaping across alligator pits; get rid of the math-and-reading cartridges.

“They’re all educational,” she said. “They teach you strategy.”

Ouch! While math was never really my strongest subject, I’m still grateful Mom pointed out that any game can teach you something. Sure, I’ve spent a great deal of time playing video games ever since, but memories of going to the next-door neighbors’ house to play Sorry! and Checkers remain fondly in my mind. And the good news for parents is there are more board games than ever before, and nearly all of them have something to teach your kids — especially when it comes to math.

Connect 4

One, two, three, four. Simple enough, right? Yet, this classic two-person game from Hasbro is not only showing how to make a vertical, horizontal or diagonal lineup of four black or red coins, but it is also simultaneously instructing you to think about the bigger picture and see beyond those four tokens in a row.

Pattern recognition is important in life, as it can alert you to danger or reward. Learning how to recognize them early will put your kids on the right path.

Company: Milton Bradley/Hasbro

Year: 1974

Players: 1-2

Playing time: 1-10 minutes

Monopoly

It’s hard for me, as a New Jersey native, to imagine that Atlantic City was ever really all that great, but nonetheless, Mr. Monopoly continues to invite the young and young-at-heart alike to try to take over the boardwalk and rule the seaside.

Monopoly’s math lessons are pretty much hidden in plain sight: Once you own a property, other players must pay “rent” upon landing on one of them. And how much? Well, that’s part of the game then, isn’t it? And the more you own, the more you stand to make; the less you have, the more you stand to lose to the other players.

It’s all about calculation, risk and, of course, luck, which plays a big part in both games and life.

Company: Milton Bradley/Hasbro

Year: 1935

Players: 2-10

Playing time: 1-4 hours

Scrabble

Scrabble marries reading and math in a unique way that makes it extremely good for the brain. Unlike some board games, which have a central “object” that players are trying to win through rolls of a die — thus entailing chance and not skill — Scrabble requires as much attention to arithmetic as word knowledge.

Scrabble is actually a great way to marry left- and right-brain abilities, as each letter has its value. Building words successfully must be intertwined with landing “power” letters (hello “Q”!) on those double- and triple-letter scores.

Sure, you draw letters at random, but what’s great here is kids are learning not only how to multiply their scores by going for those important double- and triple-word scores, but also seeing what words their opponents have already made to then build upon for even better scores. (Hopefully, that goes beyond simply adding an “S” to an earlier word.)

Company: Mattel/Hasbro

Year: 1938

Players: 1-4

Playing time: about 50 minutes

The Game of Life

If you’re old enough to remember those wacky commercials, “You can be a winner at The Game of Life,” you’ll likely get a chuckle out of this little flashback.

Yep, the youngsters might awkwardly laugh about “getting married” in Life, but they’ll simultaneously be learning about budgeting, buying a home, investing in the stock market, not spending more than you have and, in general, just knowing how to count up your cash.

In other words, math. You, too, can be a winner.

Company: Milton Bradley

Year: 1860

Players: 2-6

Playing time: 1 hour

Perfection

Nothing focuses the mind like a time limit, and Perfection has challenged generations of kids to get the shapes into the correct holes before the timer hits zero and BOOM! goes the plate from under the shapes, tossing them everywhere.

In addition to teaching how to work under pressure and within a set amount of time, Perfection also gives kids a better understanding of how time works.

And did I mention it goes BOOM! when the timer runs out? Rather than play by the rules, when I was young I would put the shapes in first, then start the timer and wait for the delightful crash when the pieces went flying. That part didn’t teach me much per se, but the sound was quite satisfying.

Company: Milton Bradley

Year: 1973

Players: unlimited

Playing time: multiples of 1 minute

Checkers

Ah, if life only moved in a straight, discernible line, with choices that logically led to the next one and then the next one after that. However, fate often proceeds in a diagonal fashion and often loops back in on itself.

So too with Checkers, where you have to “jump” over enemy pieces to reach the other side. Then, once “crowned,” you can even move backwards. Checkers is actually quite math-tastic as it trains kids to think several moves ahead in a geometric fashion — to see the whole board, as it were, both in offensive and defensive postures as they work their way to dominating the scene.

King me!

Company: multiple

Year: at least 5,000 years old

Players: 2

Playing time: 30 minutes to 2 hours

Dungeons & Dragons

For the non-nerds out there, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Dungeons & Dragons (or “D&D” as the geek set knows it) features so many different types of dice that your head will spin as much as the game pieces. There’s even a hundred-sided die!

Granted, D&D is as much a narrative-focused activity as it is one of rolling dice to see if you win or lose in battle with orcs and serpents, but the numbers you have to work with are well above the more traditional six faces of typical dice. You also have to keep track of your life points and powers, so it’s not enough to just be letting the dice control the action.

D&D isn’t for passive playing; you have to be engaged and active to both be in the “campaign” and focus on achieving goals. Oh, and counting. Always counting.

Company: TSR, Wizards of the Coast

Year: 1974

Players: unlimited

Playing time: many hours

Mouse Trap

Was there a more fun DIY game than Mouse Trap? Especially when the lever was pulled and down came the basket to trap the hapless rodent and its plastic cheese?

I have no doubt that the minds of many a contemporary engineer were stimulated by Mouse Trap. Whether those kids of yore became roller coaster designers, space programmers or computer designers, they all started out from a place of wanting to know how things work and what makes them “go.”

A million calculations later, the Mars Rovers landed. Or an airplane took off. Or your house was wired for cable TV. You can thank Mouse Trap.

Company: Hasbro

Year: 1963

Players: 2-4

Playing time: 30 minutes

Risk

Why just take over the Atlantic City Boardwalk when you can take over the entire world? While Monopoly makes a game out of corporate takeover, its brainier cousin, Risk, has players vying to have a monopoly over, well, the entire globe.

Risk is a notoriously lengthy game, taking hours or even several days for a final winner to be crowned. Thus, focusing on the ultimate goal requires a great deal of patience but also major concentration as you must marshall out your forces to both take and defend territories. And while kids may think that they’re just playing at world domination, what they’re actually learning underneath it all is the proper apportioning of limited resources.

In other words, mathematics applied to geopolitics. This is the kind of activity that will not only gets kids to care more about math but might even get them into political science. Hell, the winner of the 2048 presidential election could right now be playing Risk!

Company: Hasbro

Year: 1957

Players: 2-6

Playing time: 1-8 hours

Chess

So, a pawn can only move forward, unless it is taking an enemy piece, which it can only do in a diagonal. A queen, the most valuable piece, can move any number of spaces in any direction. And a knight, for some reason, must advance or retreat in an L-pattern.

I’m convinced that Chess should be a part of mathematics lessons for younger children, both from a strategic and tactical perspective, as well as helping them to bring a third-dimensional modus to a two-dimensional activity. Indeed, some schools are incorporating Chess into the classroom, not so much so that they can train the next Garry Kasparov, but enough to increase students’ thinking and help their brains absorb tougher concepts like solving problems across multiple dimensions at once.

Check. Mate.

Company: multiple

Year: 6th century CE

Players: 2

Playing time: varies, 10-60 minutes for a casual game

Chutes and Ladders / Snakes and Ladders

Whether you’re playing the game with slides or snakes — either one is bad — this classic die-rolling board game also offers the basic yet important exercise of exposing young players to the relationship that exists from starting at one and moving all the way up to 100.

And while no actual calculation is required beyond advancing the number of steps dictated by the spinner or die, repeated exposure to the numbers serves to make them familiar and more easy to work with for the young minds simultaneously giggling as they fall on a big snake back toward the smaller numbers yet again.

Company: multiple

Year: 2nd century CE

Players: 2 or more

Playing time: 15 to 45 minutes

Battleship

I don’t care how old you are, saying “You sunk my battleship!” is still funny. In yet another entry from the good people at Hasbro, Battleship has you calling out coordinates in the hopes of scoring a “direct hit” on the opponent’s fleet. When you learn if your imaginary cannon fire was a “miss,” you mark it on your grid with a white pin; if a “hit,” a red one.

Ladies and gentlemen, what you have before you, in addition to war games, is nothing less than the foundational principles of the X-Y axis paradigm, with kids just starting to understand marking coordinates along a mathematical grid without even realizing it.

You’re welcome.

Company: Milton Bradley

Year: 1967

Players: 2

Playing time: varies

Sumoku

Think of this as Scrabble or Bananagrams with numbers.

Up to eight players can play. The goal? To add the colored, numbered tiles to the board to achieve a specific mathematical goal. For instance, the digits in all groups of tiles placed in rows and columns must add up to a multiple of either 3, 4 or 5. Everyone's allowed as long as needed to make their move, so it encourages kids to think about strategy as well.

Company: Blue Orange

Year: 2010

Players: 1-8

Playing time: varies

Sorry!

Sorry! is the ultimate family game — especially if those families are competitive and really want to get each other back with the backstabbing sorry-not-sorry card.

For youngsters, it also requires a lot of counting from space to space as everyone competes to get their four pieces around the board and safely home first.

Company: Hasbro

Year: 1934

Players: 2-4

Playing time: varies

Yahtzee

It’s still fun to say — even though it sounds like something one of the kids at Hogwarts might yell after someone sneezes. Sure, this game of dice has the ultimate goal of screaming “Yahtzee” so loud that parents can hear it from the basement. But the great mathematical principle secretly at work here is probability: what dice are likely to come up and what the chances are of rolling five-of-a-kind, i.e., a Yahtzee.

According to our pals at ThoughtCo.com, the odds of rolling a Yahtzee, of any number, are one in 7,776. So, please, by all means, scream it as loud as you like when it happens!

And how many different TOTAL kinds of rolls are there possible with six dice? Don’t ask me; I haven’t been in math class since 1995!

Company: Hasbro

Year: 1956

Players: 2 or more

Playing time: 30 minutes