These terrific math board games for kids are sure to please, build mathematical skills, and become a new favorite! Whether you are looking for ways to incorporate simple math with your toddler, build numeracy skills with your preschooler, or help your ‘big’ kid with multiplication and fractions, we’ve got you covered.
Math Board Games for Kids
We love games so much we created a whole series!
- 20+ Best Board Games for Kids
- Board Games for 3-Year-Olds You’ll Love
- Favorite Board Games for Toddlers
- 20+ Best Family Games
- Games for Preschool that Teach!
- Free Preschool Games
- ABC Games and Alphabet Activities that Teach!
Math Board Games Help Build Number Sense
We have put together a list of games that are far more than just entertaining kids. These math board games build math skills and number sense, while also teaching cooperation, strategy, and sportsmanship. Many of the math board games for toddlers and preschoolers develop one-to-one correspondence, which is an essential foundational math skill in the early years. Other games work on subitizing which is a great way to teach children to identify how many in a set without having to physically count.
The concept of “gameschooling” has been around for a while. Caitlyn Fitzpatrick, a gameschooling momma of three, states, “Adding play-based learning and game schooling to your homeschool routine can fuel learning and that learning is both academic and non-academic in nature!” Allowing children to learn math through games gives them a chance to practice, fail, and try again with far less pressure than traditional options. Plus learning through games is just fun, for both adults and children!
Math Board Games for Toddlers (Ages 2-3)
These magnetic color-coded matching cows are really something to ‘moo’ about! They teach a multitude of skills to the littlest ones including color identification, fine motor, matching, and exposure to numbers and quantities. There are endless ways to play with these learning cows! Play scavenger hunt and hide one part of the cow and invite your toddler to find its match. Or take ’em outside and go on a color hunt and bring the counting cows along. These cows are an adorable introduction to early learning skills.
Jumbo Counting Bear Sorting Game
Counting bears are the epitome of childhood, am I right? These jumbo and colorful rainbow counting bears are great for teaching colors, patterns, counting, and developing fine motor skills. Also, they can be incorporated into almost every game or activity. Load and count them onto cars, trucks, or trains, make a sensory bottle, make a teddy bear wall, sort them into colored liners, even try your hand at stacking them! These counting bears are a great investment as your child grows as they will be great math manipulatives as their math skills develop, too.
Bee to Hive Color Matching Game
It’s time to work on that pincher grasp and develop those fine motor skills while you play this ‘bee’utiful game! Invite your toddler to use the tweezers to pick up the bees and place it in the matching colored hive. This toddler math game is so appealing and is great for counting, color identification, and visual discrimination!
Don’t forget the shapes! Toddlers love learning their colors AND shapes and this chunky puzzle does just the trick. Easy for little hands but still challenging enough, this colorful shape puzzle helps little ones sort by shape, color, and number as they thread the puzzle pieces into the correct position. Great for hand-eye coordination and teaching persistence and patience too.
Topper Takes a Trip Match It Game
Toddlers love putting things in and out and matching items. This fun matching game invites your youngest ones to fill their suitcase with the five items they’ll need for their trip. It includes a matching card with pictures so toddlers can match their items to their destination. This game introduces matching, counting to five, visual discrimination, and encourages creative thinking and imagination. It’s such a fun way to play together!
This toddler math board game is designed specifically for toddlers to play cooperatively so that all players win or lose together. If the players collect all the oversized colorful fruit before the raven reaches the orchard, they win together! Perfectly sized for little hands, this game teaches color identification, turn-taking, and counting. It’s a great first cooperative game!
Math Board Games for Preschoolers
One of our favorite ways to teach math and number sense to preschoolers is with ten-frame counting mats! They are perfect to use with mini erasers, gems, seasonal manipulatives, or anything you have that your little learners would be interested in. We’ve got them for every theme and season, including, ice cream, outer space, unicorns, farm, Valentine’s Day, and many more!
You can even grab a set of our ten-frames for FREE!! Just fill out the form below and we’ll get some dinosaur ten-frame counting mats right over to you.
Also, don’t miss our themed counting cards – they work like magic to teach foundational math concepts in a fun, inviting, and hands-on way!
There is no monkeying around here… balance the correct number of monkeys on one side of the scale and the numeral on the other side to make the scale balanced equally. This is a clever game for preschoolers since the weighted numbers correspond with the number of monkeys. It helps preschoolers visually see that the value of the number will remain constant. (This is called conservation of number and is an important number sense skill!) This game also comes with simple addition and subtraction cards to help build initial more/fewer skills.
Bingo is certainly timeless but Zingo has really made it come to life for young children! They have developed a Zinger which dispenses the bingo tiles for easy matching and excitement. Race to be the first player to fill up your number board and you win! Easy to play, catchy for little ones, and an engaging way to help learn counting and subitizing skills from 1-12.
This classic childhood game is back with a brand-new twist! Players take turns picking cherries, blueberries, apples, and oranges from their trees. Preschoolers practice taking turns spinning and deciding how many fruits to pick or put back. Such a fun game that includes color identification, counting, and simple addition and subtraction!
Zoom your way through math with this hands-on racing game. Set up the numbered tracks and start your engines! This creative game encourages color identification, counting, sorting, and simple addition and subtraction. Not to mention the colorful rubber cars are great for creative play and imagination.
Math shouldn’t be ‘ruff’! This adorable pup needs your help to fill up the baskets with dog bones. Infuse some fine motor fun since Shelby the dog doubles as a jumbo tweezer, perfect for picking up those slippery dog bones. Learn counting and more/less with this dog-gone fun game!
Oh no! The baby chicks have flown the coop! Help Mama Hen get her babies back in this adorable and smart counting-based cooperative game. Short and sweet, the gameplay is about 15 minutes which is just long enough to practice counting, build team rapport, and feel success when you get the baby chicks back to the safety of the coop. A great introduction to simple board games and learning to play by the rules.
Math Card Games for School Age Kids
This no-prep card game uses ten frame counting dots to encourage preschoolers to notice patterns and identify numbers. The first person to ‘slap’ the slap it card wins that round and collects all the cards. Number Slap Jack is an exciting and fast-paced way to learn number identification and counting!
An absolute classic, this card game is so much fun to play and your success depends on your ability to be strategic and eliminate your cards as quickly as possible. Match one of your cards with the current card shown on top of the deck by either color or number. Use the special-action cards, like Draw Two or Skips and Reverses to try and outsmart your competition. Don’t forget to yell “Uno!” when you are down to your last card!
Learn to play in less than a minute with this fast-paced, intense card game, similar to the classic card game War. The card deck is divided evenly between all players and each player blindly places a card face up. When a “smack it” card appears, the first person to smack the deck gets the stack. Play continues from there. The player with the highest number wins the stack. It is ideal for building beginner math skills (numbers 1 thru 50) and greater than/less than understanding. Plus it’s high-energy and quick to play – games usually only last less than 10 minutes!
This is an exciting and strategic math card game, perfect for building up mental addition skills. The Queens have fallen under a sleeping spell and you must work through the cards to wake them up. Full of strategy, quick thinking, and mental math, you’ll work to find a way to rouse the queens. Look out for potions and dragons as you play, they are certainly not helpful! The player who wakes the most queens wins. This game is a fan favorite and with play lasting around 15 minutes, it’s a great game to play over and over again as you learn strategy tips and tricks!
Fast-paced and challenging, this card game is designed to test your spatial intelligence as they try to outsmart their competitors. With 60 challenges of increasing difficulty, from beginner to expert, this game will continue to challenge and test kids 8 years and older. To play, players carefully study each of the 16 transparent cards laid out and try to create more matches than their opponents. Matches are created by stacking two or more cards on top of one another so that a colored hoop matches up with the same color ball on a different card. The player with the most matched cards wins!
Math Board Games for School Age Kids
Ages 5+
It’s time to outsmart that clumsy thief raccoon with this interesting card game! The goal of the game is to find two cards in which the numbers add up to ten. You can also snag stacks from other players if you have a card in your hand that makes 10 when added to the top of another player’s stack. But watch out for the thief and trap cards! The player at the end with the most cards wins the game. This game is perfect for teaching ways to make 10 and developing strategy.
Find yourself on a magical new island and learn addition and subtraction with this enchanting game. With two ways to play, regular mode or speedy mode, players must keep up with adding and subtracting as they roll the die as well as learning double and half concepts. With equations up to 20, it’s great for kindergarten and first-grade students!
Build fluency and ease in addition as you cross the swamp. It includes 4 swamp creatures and dice up to 5 so that school-aged kiddos can practice their addition facts to 10. This game is a great alternative to flashcards and worksheets, as children learn their facts with repeated play!
Who’s got the money? In this game, players will collect, count, and exchange money from start to finish. Learn about dollars and cents with realistic play money and adding values up to 100 cents. A great way to build addition and place value skills while using real-life money skills!
Math Board Games For Ages 8+
Similar to Clumsy Thief Jr., this game is all about adding to a certain number, and in this case, it’s 100! Players keep working their way to 100 but watch out for that thief and jail card! They can take your cards and in this game, the player with the most money wins! So watch out!
A math game disguised as a monster-pizza eating contest? You bet! This game is designed to build knowledge of fractions, decimals, and percentages as players work to earn the highest bill. Since monsters eat in fractions, they can steal pizza from other players, but only if you know your math!
Tenzi is fast-paced and a blast to play with others! You must roll your 10 dice as fast as you can as you try to get all the dice to show the same number… which makes the game instantly competitive and silly fun for all the players. But this game is not a one-trick pony, there are 8 additional ways to play with the dice, as well as a new add-on that includes 77 different ways to play! Great for playing with young children to encourage them to recognize number patterns on the dice or playing with older children as the game gets more complex!
With four levels of play, this game is sure to challenge for quite some time! This game can be played using addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division so it truly supports students in all math levels. Play together or individually, these double-sided cards can challenge kids from kindergarten to middle school!
With 100 number cards, this game offers practice with multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, and even square roots. It’s great for building fluency and ease with easy and difficult math concepts and includes various levels of play. Don’t forget to show your proof!
This colorful game board is more than just looks! Learn and master multiplication, division, factorization, and prime number concepts by combining colors. Players will multiply by combining colors and divide by removing colors. The colors on the Prime Climb board help students see the connection between the numbers and their factors. This game makes learning a challenging skill fun and appealing.
We hope you loved these math board games for kids! Have you and your kids tried any of these? Let us know about your favorite one, and don’t forget to snag your free printable dinosaur 10-frames!
- The Best Preschool Books for Circle Time - August 25, 2024
- All About Me Art Activities - August 10, 2024
- Fun and Exciting August Preschool Themes - August 1, 2024
Leave a Reply