Plain-English rules and scoring guides for card and board games that quietly teach arithmetic, with printable boards and score sheets.

• Cribbage

  Three hundred years old and still the fastest way to make a child fluent in number bonds to fifteen. Every hand is a search for combinations that add to 15, and the counting never stops.

• Twenty-four

  Turn four cards and make exactly 24 using all four, in any order, with any operations. The purest order-of-operations drill there is, and it plays in thirty seconds.

• Addition War

  The card game every child already knows, with one change that turns it into a number-bond drill. Both players turn two cards, add them, and the bigger total takes all four.

• Shut the Box

  A pub game from Normandy that happens to be the best decomposition drill in existence. Roll two dice and close any combination of tiles adding to the total.

• Pig

  A dice game with one rule and one decision. Keep rolling to build a total, but a single one wipes the turn out. The best introduction to risk a classroom can run in five minutes.

• Multiplication War

  Two cards each, multiply, highest product takes them. A whole times-table session that feels like a card game, because it is one.

• Make Ten

  Cards laid out face up; take any two that add to ten. That is the whole game, and number bonds to ten are the single most useful thing a young child can know by heart.

• Nim

  Take counters from rows, and whoever takes the last one wins. It looks like luck until a child finds the pattern, and finding the pattern is the point.

• Yahtzee

  Five dice, three rolls, and a scorecard that has to be filled whether the dice cooperate or not. The scoring is the maths, and deciding where to put a bad roll is the lesson.

• Dominoes: Five-Up

  Dominoes with a scoring rule that turns every placement into a search for multiples of five. The counting-by-fives table gets a serious workout.

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