Learn multiplication and have fun with Say Cheese Cafe

I have rather tedious memories of learning my multiplication tables.  Endless rounds of flash cards, and lots of repetition.  Tedious mind-numbing repetition.  I know it was necessary, but that doesn’t make it fun.  I want learning to be fun when it can.  Enter our new multiplication game.  It’s earned a place in our homeschool math and board game collection because it’s not tedious.  It’s fun.

{This post is sponsored by Logic Roots, all opinions are my own, and I’m eyeing a couple of their other games}

Say Cheese Cafe multiplication game

Say Cheese Cafe multiplication game is a nicely portable game.  The players are on a picnic and happily eating their way through the cheese and other treats in the basket as they practice their math facts.

How Say Cheese Cafe works

To start one player finds the target numbers by flicking the spinner.  That means you are looking for multiples of that number.  Then each player takes turn dropping a chip in.  If their chip is a multiple of the target number, they say what it is (5×5=25 for example), and they get everything in the picnic basket.

Occasionally you’ll draw out other tokens, and those change the game play.

Dessert tokens are worth extra points, YAY!

Rotten food or worms cause you to dump the entire basket into the trash can.  No one wants to eat cheese that has worms on it.  The kids had great joy in dumping baskets full of chips into the trash.

Special tokens allow you to steal extra tokens from another player.  This can be hilarious as it’s a random draw, and my kids had great joy in giving their sibling rotten food.  Not so great joy in giving them dessert.

Modifications we made to Say Cheese Cafe

This can be a longer game for young kids if they are not good at multiplication yet.  You can make that better by letting them write out their times tables, or having a times table sheet handy to look at.

There are also a large number of tokens.  If you are limited on time and only have a few minutes to play, then you can play to a point total of 20 points.  We played until someone ran out of tokens and the game was around 30 minutes for us.

Final call on Say Cheese

Say Cheese Cafe is a relatively quick playing math review game.  It’s high on the randomness factor, but you somewhat need that to make reviewing multiplication fun.  We’ll play this for another year or so, and then I’ll give it to my niece and nephew to play, and the fun will continue.

Looking for more math fun?  Check out my math pinterest board.  Check out Logic Roots facebook, twitter, and Pinterest (their math sense of humor board is great) because they share some great tips.