Muggins and other games

Old Fashioned Products

Old Fashioned Products offers great games for teaching mathematical thinking as well as improving computation skills. Games are offered in two formats: wooden boards with marbles, dice, and directions ($26.95 each) or enamel wipe-off boards with dice and directions ($9.95 each). For the wipe-off board versions, the customer supplies either crayons or wipe-off markers to color spaces rather than moving marbles. Muggins is the most popular game. Rolling three 6-face dice, players must add, subtract, multiply, and/or divide numbers to produce a total. They have to perform a great deal of mental math while strategizing to score bonus points. Muggins is suggested for ages 10 and up, but other games such as Jelly Beans and Knock-Out better suit younger children. Jelly Beans, geared for ages 4 to 6, works on number recognition, simple addition and subtraction, and thinking skills. Knock-Out, for ages 6 to adult, combines addition and subtraction in a challenging strategy game. Opps! is yet another game targeting older children (about age 12 and up) with prealgebra concept practice. The wooden boards are also available as two-sided combination game boards ($39.95 each), featuring any combination of the above three games. Old Fashioned Crafts’ brochure lists a number of other games that might also be of interest. Their newest game, Number Neighbors, covers a number of skills for ages 3 to 9.