Guess My Card: A Math Game for any Operation

Challenge your child to create and solve math riddles in an easy to set up card game! With two or more players, draw from a deck of playing cards to find your numbers. Then, take turns inventing clues that will help others figure out what cards you have. Use an assortment of the basic math operations to help your child practice division, multiplication, addition, or subtraction. By articulating these problems and using backwards thinking, your child will improve his critical thinking and math reasoning skills.

What You Need:

• Two decks of playing cards (with the face cards removed)
• Minimum of two players

What You Do:

1. Explain to the players that they will alternate between being a clue-giver and a guesser.
2. One player should deal 6 cards to each player and place the remaining cards in between the players.
3. After examining the cards, the player who's up first must decide which cards he wants to involve in his clue. Then, he must present the riddle to help the guesser figure out what cards the player has in his hand (e.g. the product of two of my cards is 70). If you're playing with more than two people, have the rotation of clue givers and guessers go around in a circle of play.
4. Next, the guesser has about 5 seconds to guess the value of the cards.
5. If the guesser is correct, the clue-giver should give the involved cards to the guesser. Players should start a "win pile" of the cards they've won.
6. If he doesn't guess correctly after five seconds, the clue-giver should give another clue involving different cards.
7. If you're playing with more than two players, after the second clue has been given, any of the other players are allowed to chime in and guess the value of the clue cards.
8. The clue-giver should then draw how ever many replacement cards he needs, plus an additional card which he should add to his win pile as a reward for giving a good clue.
9. Keep playing until the two decks have been depleted.
10. Have the players count the cards in their win piles. The player who has collected the most cards by the end of the game wins!

If you like using math games in your class, you might also like these FUN games to practice rounding!  Plus, using TASK CARDS to play Scoot is another super fun way to get busy and have fun practicing all kinds of math!