- Semper Smart Games Election Night! A Super Fun Board Game to Learn Math, Geography, and Civics with Dice – Updated Electoral College Game for Kids and Families (Ages 8 & Up)

My family and I really loved this game. Played it in teams and the winners get to be called president and vice president for the day. What I loved most about the game is that kids are getting a civics lesson on the electoral college while there playing without even realizing it. It also meets the educational needs of children of various ages since we're able to either use addition on one side or multiplication on the other side. And as an added bonus fractions are practiced. I decided to later purchase the bonus card questions but haven't broken them out yet . But I highly recommend this game. I do want to add though game play is rather long. I'd say 30/ 45 min. But the dice are so cool and enable so much mental math practice that you could choose to play this instead of a math lesson. I purchased this and a few other games to help prevent the summer slide of math and help with Geography. So far so great, been using with 3 and 5th grader. And I can tell we'll be able to use for years to come.

This is an amazingly fun game. It is our family's favorite choice right now. It is easy to play and draws you in with some very thoughtful rules that make it easy to strategize how you will get the necessary electoral votes. It is also really funny to see a state that in the real world might be red or blue go the other way in the game on the road to the white house. One of the great things about this game is that there are several layers of numbers in the game and several opportunities each turn for math. However, it is not overwhelming at all and the game designers built in a lot of visual clues and ways to keep track of everything so the math is fun and doesn't disrupt game play. Highly recommend!

We love this game it is so clever. Great job to the designers. It's fantastically good fun using arithematic in a fun way where you just don't realise you're practising math skills. We just get into the strategy of placing our electoral votes where we want. Playing republicans and democratics in a fun way is great for getting kids used to politics without all of the party politics, but in a way that just helps you understand the system. Get to practice geography too with working out the names and locations of the US States (I always mix up the ones in the middle!) 2 games in one with one game board, multiplication and addition in one game, and the other is subtraction and division. Plus there are 2 levels of play so it is brilliant for any age. My son is 22 and we had a great laugh playing and with a number of strategies I don't think we will get fed up with this game fast. Also, you can play it with 2 or more players so I can't wait to play with friends.

I was scared. It’s title suggests as a political game, but its description suggests a math game, so I finally took a chance and played the audition side with my nine year old daughter. Turns out it is a strategy game that helps with geography learning and understanding of the electoral vote process but aside from that it is just figuring out how you can be the first to get the most points added up in the game is set up very well to make it easy to calculate my only concern is if the dry race markers go dry or become hard to race at some point because you’re writing right on the game board but I love it and look forward to playing more in the future and I’m glad to finally have a good two person game because most of the time I need more people that are willing to play

This game is AWESOME!! I am a K-5 Math Specialist and a mother of a 2nd grader child. At first I thought, in theory the game is a good idea. After I played the game I realized that it's actually amazing!! Kids are motivated to combine (add or multiply) two out of four dice to strategically collect electoral votes across the US. This game is easy to learn and easy to extend. I literally saw some of my daughter's fact fluency evolve from counting on to derived facts in one sitting. The game has a ton of repetition without feeling repetitive at all. To the game maker - When's your next game coming out? I am always looking for a game (learning related) that reaches a wide audience, is easy to adapt, and most of all fun to play!

Bought this to jazz up the class before a long break with my Government students. They were hooked and didn’t want to go to their next class! A high achievement for hard to impress 10 graders. I will buy more sets to try with bigger classes for next year! The only reason I didn’t give 5 stars is because I want to see if the dry erase markers erase completely or stain with time and repeated use.

What a fun game. My 11 year old and I just played for the first time. We started with the addition board to get a feel for the game. He loved it. It’s great for strategy and helps teach the concept of the electoral college and how it works in our election system. It is a genius way to teach kids about geography, population and how our election system works. He’s already asking to play again.

Pretty simple concept: a player rolls four dice and arrange them into two pairs, and adds each pair together to get two final sums (the same way that Can't Stop works, if you've played that). Each possible final sum has a few US states associated with it, and you can pick one state per final sum to gain a mark in. Smaller states are won instantly, larger ones require 2, 3, or even 5 marks before you win their electoral votes. Then your opponent does the same, and you go back and forth until somebody has enough votes to guarantee a win. There is also a more advanced option where players multiply the dice together instead of adding. As an educational game where part of the purpose is teaching math skills, it uses special dice so that kids can get used to adding in ways that are slightly more difficult (e.g. no chances to just add 1 or multiply by 10). Another interesting feature is that there are no playing pieces - rather than placing tokens or counters on the states, you have dry-erase markers and a board that works with them. So you still have to careful not to wipe out the game status irrecoverably, but it's probably harder to do that by mistake than it would be to knock over blocks or chits. And finally, there aren't really any "politics" in the game despite being about the US presidential election. It sticks with the basic facts about how the electoral process works - there are no debates, issues, or opinions in the game. Even the two sides don't have political names or symbols, they are just colored red and blue. It's not an especially deep game but I think it does a great job of what it set it out to do: teach math and civics at the same time while having some meaningful thinking and strategic decisions. It's not always obvious what the right combinations of states are to choose. Is putting 1 mark in a 17-vote state that needs 2 marks to win a better choice than putting 1 mark down to instantly win an 8-vote state? I think so, but I'm not sure. Is it worth it to put marks on a big state your opponent already has a lead in, vs trying to just go for a medium sized state that hasn't been contested yet? This sort of thing means it functions well as an actual board game, rather than just being a school exercise in disguise.