Rainbow Math 3: Pirate Adventure is the third game in a series of games. The first game is supposed to work on counting, the second works on addition and subtraction, and this game practices multiplication and division.
When I purchased Pirate Adventure, my kids weren’t quite to multiplication yet, so I knew we needed an addition/subtraction option. I purchased a set of blank dice and made my own +/- die to add to the game.
How to play
When it’s your turn, decide what operation die you want to use. There are several operation dice: all multiplication; all division; multiplication or division; multiplication, addition, or subtraction; or all four operations. There is also a die with all equal signs, but we don’t tend to use it during gameplay.
Next, choose what kinds of numbers you want to work with. You have three options: The green numbers are 0-5, the blue numbers are 5-10, and the purple are 2-digit numbers (one has numbers up to 32, and the other has bigger numbers). There are two dice for each color. You can pick both of one color, or two different colors.
Choosing to multiply the two purple dice gets you some big numbers! 12×48=576 Start with the hundreds, and grab 5 gold coins for going past the treasure chest (100) 5 times.
Rainbow Math 3: Pirate Adventure is a versatile math game!
I love how versatile this game is. Each child can work at their level, whatever that may be. Really little ones can work on numbers 0-5 (and if you add a +/- die, they can work on adding and subtracting those numbers, or you could play without an operation die and they could just count). Advanced students can multiply those big purple numbers and see how many coins they can get in one turn!
The board is just a ten-by-ten grid. I numbered our boxes, because otherwise, it was too difficult for me to keep track. I started with 0 and proceeded numerically across the top. When you get to the end of the row, start the next row again on the left. This is different than how Chutes and Ladders is numbered, but makes it much easier to count by 10s.
Getting big answers in Rainbow Math 3: Pirate Adventure
When your kids start getting big numbers, have them first figure out the 10s in their answer and move those, then figure out and move the ones. To move by 10s, just head down the column. When they get to the end of the board, they collect a gold coin and continue on in the upper left-hand corner with 0 (which would be 100). When they’re multiplying those big purple numbers and getting answers in the hundreds, they collect one coin for each hundred in their answer before continuing on with their tens and ones.
Next, slide your pawn down one row for each of your 10s. In this case, you’ll slide down to the 70s since 2+576=578.
When we first started playing Rainbow Math 3: Pirate Adventure, we said that we finished the game when we got to 100. As my kids got older, we set a time limit; a half-hour or an hour. Now, we play until we run out of gold coins.
While I could assign my kids operations and tell them what color number dice to use, I prefer to let them choose. For my kids, the gold coins are highly motivating, so this is all that is usually required to get them to choose harder math problems. Actually, I’ve been known to have to tell my daughter that she needs to choose easier dice because she’s not yet ready for those hard dice (and on her last turn, using those hard dice meant a big meltdown)!
Easy to DIY!
I added Rainbow Math 3 to our game collection because my son has long been obsessed with pirates. I thought this would be a good game to add that would encourage him. However, if you would like to DIY it, you just need a 100s board and dice. It’s easy to make a 100s board from a spreadsheet program, and you can use digital dice.
One final point. Sporadically on the board, there are squares that say to move ahead or back so many spaces. We found the “move back 30 spaces” and the “Go To Start” squares to be exceptionally discouraging. We made a family rule that you can’t go back 10 or more spaces. This removed the extremes, but still allowed my kids to work on being okay with the game telling them to move back some spaces.
I chose to unbox and bag our game to save space. It’s not a huge space-saver, but we are able to have a lot more games since we hang so many!