another race to 100 game

Today's game at the math classes was not particularly well liked, but we are including this note for completeness and future reference.

Race to 100

how many players: 2-5
material: 1d6, 100 board, position markers (the kids made their own out of play-dough)
start: all players start on 1 on the 100 board
turns: each player's takes a separate turn. They roll the dice, then move their piece up the 100 board some multiple of the dice value (up to 10x).
winning: first player to get exactly to 100 wins

This game practices multiplication, skip counting, and factoring. Here are some example questions to stimulate thinking about game strategy:

• Would you rather have your piece on 99, 98, or 96?
• What about 71 and 70?
• If you are on 88, what are your chances of winning on the next roll?

Game reception
The kids found this game fairly easy. In retrospect, perhaps we should have played this game before the Times Square factors game.

Potential extension
The game is nicely suited to analysis by working back from the higher positions and/or analyzing a simpler version of the game. This may be a nice exercise for our programming classes, especially as we have recently been working with arrays.