Pyramid (Not the Egyptian Kind)

I just taught Evan how to play Pyramid. It's one of my favorite math games. He totally kicked my butt. I'm almost never able to get rid of my whole pyramid but he did it both times he played! To play, you need a traditional deck of cards with the jokers, kings, queens, and jacks removed. Then arrange twenty-one of the remaining cards in six row pyramid, like the picture here. Each row should overlap the row above it.

The goal is to remove as many cards as possible from the pyramid starting at the bottom. To remove a card, it must be fully exposed. When the game starts, only the six cards in the bottom row meet this requirement. You can only remove fully exposed tens or two fully exposed cards whose sum equals ten. So, if you have a six and a four exposed, you can remove them.. or a two and an eight or a seven and a three or two fives, etc. You get the idea.

After removing all exposed matches, you can play off the 19 cards still in your hand. You turn these cards over one at a time. When you turn a card over, you can use it to match any exposed card in the pyramid. Cards that don't form matches are put, face up, in a discard pile. You can go back to the discard pile any time you want and use the top card. Actually, I allowed Evan to keep three discard piles so he would have more cards to match. I thought that was probably the secret to his success. But no, when I tried it with three discard piles, I still had oodles of cards left in my pyramid.

The game ends when you've turned over all nineteen cards that weren't part of the original pyramid. Your score is the number of cards remaining in the pyramid. I usually have a handful of cards left. Evan had none. You can use a cheat sheet with the ten addition family on it for new players. It makes the game less of a chore and more fun. It doesn't take very many rounds before they aren't looking at the sheet at all (and I'll brag and say Evan didn't use one at all).

This game, and many more elementary math games, is from Games for Math by Peggy Kaye. I copied a lot of her instructions word for word. You can find excerpts from the book, along with some of her other books, at the web site linked above.