Author: Emily Tietjen

Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

Ultimate tic-tac-toe is a board game composed of nine tic-tac-toe boards arranged in a 3 × 3 grid. Players take turns playing in the smaller tic-tac-toe boards until one of them wins in the larger tic-tac-toe board. Compared to traditional tic-tac-toe, strategy in this game is conceptually more difficult and has proven more challenging for […]

Trading Spaces

Slide Color A and Color B pieces along the entire straight path until Color A pieces have exchanged positions with the Color B pieces. No two pieces can be on the same circle at the same time. What are the fewest moves possible? Play the online version here. . . .

How close to 100?

This has become one of our most popular tasks and we are hearing about all sorts of creative adaptations. Some youcubians have made grids of 400 and added dice, others have adapted it to let the grid represent 100%. Please post how you use this task with your students. Task Instructions This game is played […]

Pig

Pig is a simple dice game first described in print by John Scarne in 1945. Rules Each turn, a player repeatedly rolls a die until either a 1 is rolled or the player decides to “hold”: If the player rolls a 1, they score nothing and it becomes the next player’s turn. If the player […]

5 Starts

Five starts is played with a standard deck of cards with the face cards removed, depicting the numbers from 1 to 10. The game is well suited for parties of mixed ages. Rules Lay out all of the 5’s from the deck face up in one column. Players receive seven cards and the remainder become […]

I see 10!

This is a game that supports addition to 10.   Rules   Using a standard deck of cards, remove all face cards.  Aces will be used as 1’s.  On a table, arrange 12 cards face up.  Take turns finding a pair of cards that add to be 10.  The 10’s can be removed individually.  Variations Rather […]

Circular NIM

A two-person strategy game/Un juego de estratégias de dos personas Materials/Materiales One game board/Un tablero 13 markers/13 piezas DIRECTIONS/INSTRUCCIONES Place one marker in each circle. Coloque una pieza en cada círculo. Players take turns removing one or two markers. If you take two markers, they must be from adjacent circles. Los jugadores toman turnos quitan […]

Mill/Nine Men’s Morris

Nine men’s morris is a strategy board game for two players dating at least to the Roman Empire. The game is also known as nine-man morris, mill, mills, the mill game, merels, merrills, merelles, marelles, morelles, and ninepenny marl in English. The game has also been called cowboy checkers and is sometimes printed on the […]

Pyramid Solitaire

Pyramid is a solitaire game where the object is to get all the cards from the pyramid to the foundation. Rules The object of the game is to remove pairs of cards that add up to the total of the highest card in the deck from a pyramid arrangement of 28 cards. When using the […]