The Game of Chips: Add It Up Yourself
Written: Sep 13 '05 (Updated Oct 03 '05)
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Pros: Easy-to-tote, quick-to-play game sure to please game- and math-obsessed tots.
Cons: Why spend six bucks, when you can do it yourself?
The Bottom Line: Good game for practicing early math skills, but why buy it when you can make it yourself?
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| theeye's Full Review: Jax The Game of Chips |
As you know, if you've been following my recent series of game reviews, my five-year-old son has for some time now been obsessed with game-playing. When my friends come over, he laments, they only want to play with toys. I want to play games! Lots of games. New games, old games. Card games, board games, dice games. And, best of all, grown-up games (or at least those we can convincingly represent as such).
So we've been on the lookout for appropriate additions to our game collection, preferably with some educational value (broadly defined), more adult appeal than Shoot-Me-Now and Ladders and a reasonable degree of replayability. Back in the spring, just before The Kid's birthday, I placed an order with AreYouGame.com for several soon-to-be-reviewed games that I thought might fit the bill. At the last moment, I spotted The Game of Chips by Jax for six bucks and tossed it into my cart.
In addition to his game-playing obsession, my son is (unsurprisingly, given his folks' professional and academic backgrounds) a budding math geek. As he innocently, if somewhat immodestly, put it to his teacher on the first day of kindergarten recently, I am very good at number math. And so he is. A few weeks ago, he broke off a reverie at snack time to initiate the following dialogue, completely out of left field:
The Kid: Mommy, I know what four times five is.
Mommy: Really? What's four times five?
The Kid: It's twenty.
Mommy: Yes, it is. How did you figure that out?
The Kid: Well, I know that ten plus ten is twenty. And ten has two fives in it. So that makes two fives plus two fives is four fives and that's twenty.
I pause to allow you to admire my son's reasoning which is, after all, my not-so-subtle agenda in writing this review.
You understand now why an arithmetic game seemed like a good idea. The Game of Chips, billed as a 'strategy game for the whole family', consists of a pair of ordinary dice and a set of ten green plastic chips, each embossed with a number from one to ten. That's it. Well, that and the instruction booklet.
The rules are easy as can be. Place all the chips in front of you, number side up. The first player rolls the pair of dice and then selects one or more chips whose values total to the number rolled: roll an eight, say, and you can select the 8-chip, the 6- and 2-chips or even the 5-, 2- and 1-chips. Any number of chips may be used to get your total, but you can only use a given chip once. The chips selected are taken out of play and the same player rolls again repeatedly until he can no longer generate the rolled value with the available chips. The unselected chips are then added up and their total added to the player's score and the next player takes a turn.
The goal, of course, is to minimize your score. Once any player reaches a total point score of 100, the game is over and the lowest scorer wins. The optimal strategy, sadly, is rather uninteresting: taking the combination featuring the highest possible chip essentially gets you there. Unlike some of the games we've found recently, this one has extremely limited appeal for adults or kids over the age of eight or so.
On the other hand, it's certainly a useful device for learning and practicing counting and addition skills for young children. First, it encourages kids to learn to read the values from a pair of dice: an important skill even for kids who do not plan on frequenting the craps tables for a living when they grow up. Selecting the appropriate chips is a fun way to practice early addition tables and the tactile quality of the physical chips helps make the practice less abstract. (And your math geek kid is more likely to end up playing poker than craps, anyway.) And, finally, keeping score up to one hundred, particularly if you use a child's abacus, affords yet another opportunity to develop some early numeracy.
The game is also easily portable and quick to play: when your child, as bedtime approaches, complains that Mommy, I only got to play [insert here an integer which undoubtedly seems much smaller -- and unfairly so -- to your child than to you] games today!, this is one game that you can set up, play and finish on a tight deadline.
For the uniquely math- and game-obsessed tot, then, this game has some appeal.
However.
The blazingly obvious (to an adult, that is) fact is that you don't need to throw six bucks away to play this game. You have a pair of dice already. You can write ten numbers on a sheet of paper and cross them out as they're used. Or make up ten index cards with numbers on them. Or ... well, you get the idea. There's simply no added value in this game beyond the (rather basic) game idea itself.
I give the game three stars and recommend it only because five-year-olds don't always grasp the blazingly obvious and because Having A Real Game With Real Chips And Stuff is important to them. For six bucks, we've got a tiny and indestructible package that we can toss in a bag to take with us when we travel. And six bucks isn't that much when your adorable son looks winsomely at you and says Please, Mommy, tell me you put a real game in our suitcase?
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Notes and additional resources:
Available as of this writing at AreYouGame.com for $4.99: http://www.areyougame.com/Interact/item.asp?q=chips&qmethod=0&itemno=JAX3000&sa=0
Other games my son (and his folks) recommend: King's Table, Fluxx, Kill Dr. Lucky, Rush Hour, Jr., Roadside Rescue, Aquarius, DuelMasters
Special note: Epinions is annoyingly rigid about the age range choices it allows. I'd say that five to six years old is probably the ideal age range for this game, with seven and eight year olds starting to get bored.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 6
Type of Toy: Game
Age Range of Child: 6 to 8 Years
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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