Break out the dice from your old board games and get ready to oink with victory or defeat! You’ll enjoy some good old-fashioned gambling with this math game when you show off your knowledge of addition and fill your piggy bank as you go. You can rack up practice on your addition facts to twelve without having to fill in workbook pages or answer endless flashcards.
Plus, rolling the dice makes you feel like a real casino gambler. Use your imagination to transform your kitchen table into a gaming table—throw on a green tablecloth, if you have one, to imitate the green felt covers in Las Vegas casinos. Hear the clink of coins as players hit the jackpot and imagine yourself in a sharp suit or designer dress, loud music playing and the smell of riches and perfume in the air. You won’t need cards for this, or a roulette wheel, just a reliable set of dice and maybe your lucky dice cup (snag the plastic one from your old Yahtzee game if you like). It’ll be every bit as good as Las Vegas, except in real casinos, no one ever gets to oink and dance around.
In games of chance, strategy is important. All good game players are strategists—they use what they know to make winning decisions. With this in mind, you’ll want to practice by yourself first and develop a plan to win so you can teach the game to a friend, parent or sibling and then beat them at it. The idea is to roll the dice and add up your score ass you go. You get to keep rolling as many times as you like but as soon as you roll a 1 your total score drops to zero and you do a piggy forfeit. Figure out through practice how many times you want to roll on each turn because when you end your turn you get to keep the score you got and add it to your total. If you roll a pair of ones you’ll trash your whole score down to zero for the entire game, so watch out!
Ask a friendly parent or other relative to help you with your math and then explain that you’re working on your addition facts. Display how to roll a pair of dice and use the pips as addends. Record the sum on paper and keep rolling and adding to demonstrate and then when you get a 1 explain what happens. When you roll a 1 you “Pig Out’ which means you were greedy and have to oink because you lost your points. After your new player understands the game, you’ll play a practice round without keeping score to make sure they know how to play.
Then you explain that you’re learning to count money as well and you’d like to tie that in by playing for pennies or nickels. Place the coins in the middle of the table and when either player completes a turn without pigging out, they get a coin. Whenever a player pigs out they have to return a coin to the middle. If a player rolls double ones, all their coins are returned to the center of the table and they start over with nothing. The first player whose score gets to fifty wins all the coins he or she had accumulated during that game. The other player has to put their coins back into the middle.
