A game to learn multiplication

Knowing basic multiplication by rote is an accelerant. It’s why our times’ tables are drilled into us at school. And while there are the usual flash cards, multiplication grids, and car-ride pop-quizzes, they’re seldom fun.

I’ve posted before about making boardgames as a way to teach art, creativity, game theory, and fairness. Why not add learning math to that? So I went and bought a couple of bags of dodecahedra—12-sided dice. They’re cheap, around $7 for 20 of them on Amazon.

And then, of course, it’s time to make a variant on a well-known dice game in which you try to build sets of like-numbered dice rolls. That fits (just!) on a letter-sized paper when you account for twelve combinations instead of the usual six.

Some of those numbers and combos may need tweaking.

Now it’s time to gameplay and see if I got the scores and numbers roughly right. Here’s a PDF of the sheet if you feel like trying it yourself.