The Product Game
Math Concepts
Multiplication / factors for 1 to 9
Materials
Game board, 2 kinds of tokens.
Players
2
Set up
Give 15 tokens to each player. Use a shared piece of paper filled out as follows:
Play
At the very beginning, the first player moves a token (which will be shared) onto any number from 1 to 9 in the bottom row of 1-9 squares. The second player puts another token (which will also be shared) on one of the bottom row of 1-9 squares, and then claims with their individual token the product in the 6 by 6 grid.
From then on, each player chooses to move one of either of the two tokens in the 1-9 row and claims the product (if it’s available).
Goal
The first player to claim 3 squares next to each other in a line in any direction wins.
Discussion and Tips
Discuss looking for common factors with neighboring squares to facilitate defensive or offensive plays. If your opponent needs a square to win, you may want to avoid making it easy to get the factors of that number.
Discuss whether your students prefer to create possibilities for themselves (offense) or block possibilities for their opponent (defense).
Variations
Use a board with the product numbers mixed up to give your child better practice identifying the products. The last two pages have examples of what the boards look like for using ranges of 1-10, 1-11, and 1-12. For boards that have red stars, a red star may be used by either or both players at any time.
