Ka-Ching!

One of the things I love to use for our living math lessons is games. I don’t know about your children, but mine can pick up skills they never knew they had simply by playing a game. When I taught my eldest how to multiply one of the things I started with was this very simple game called Ka-Ching! Instead of using the word “multiply” though I used the words “groups of”. My son had so much fun playing this game he had absolutely no idea he was learning a valuable math skill!

How We Use It:

When we’re having a living math day, I pull this game out and challenge my son to a round or two. It’s a very fast paced game all about buying and selling stocks. It’s really addictive to play as well!

Basically you set a game board up with the cards by laying them out in a 7×5 grid. Each person is given a certain amount of money {provided in the game} to buy stocks with. I give out money a little differently than the game indicates. I hand out one $10, one $5, one $2, & three $1’s to get the game rolling. Each player also gets one bonus card which can be paired, at any time, with any stock card from the grid. {We generally save it until the end!}

From there, on each turn a person can collect a card from the grid or they can sell stocks, the choice is theirs. The idea is to buy low and sell high. For instance, if you purchase a $3 card and a $6 card you’ve spent a mere $9, but when you sell them you get $3 x $6 for a grand total of $18!

You can see where this is going right? I didn’t explain this strategy to my child when we started playing the game. We simply played. I prefer to let them find their own strategies as they go along, it’s more likely to stick with them. That’s exactly what happened with this game! It took a few rounds of plays but he very quickly realized he needed the higher value cards in order to beat Mom at the end.

What I love:

• I love the simplicity of this game. It didn’t take us an hour or a week to figure out the instructions. It was pretty open and go!
• I love that this is made by Gamewright. Seriously! They sell some amazing, but quick, fun games!
• I love that the cards are reasonably durable considering I play this with my kids.
• I love the color! For anyone who’s visual it’s really eye popping to play, not to mention the pictures of the presidents on the money crack us all up.
• The price. If purchased in the US, this game is fairly reasonably priced at a meager $9.89 + shipping from Amazon.

What I don’t like:

When sold overseas I find the price of this game a bit much. I bought it at a local shop in Tasmania for $20. At the same time, the game is fun, educational, and thus makes it worth what I paid.

Other than that I really can’t complain about this game!

Bottom Line:

We love this highly fun, extremely addictive, amazingly educational game. You really have got to try it for yourself!