Best-Selling Math Game and Its Creator, Corne Van Moorsel.
Discover SimplyFun's best-selling math game Sumology! This wooden tile game inspires children ages 8 and up to engage in math challenges while mastering all four fundamental math operations, including order of operations.
With a quick 30-minute gameplay, families can easily weave in practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division into their busy schedules. In Sumology, players maneuver number tiles to form valid equations that interconnect with other equations. Earn points for each numerical arrangement, and compete to emerge as the ultimate victor!
Encourage children to flex their math muscles as they use critical thinking to place number tiles to create valid equations. Parents and educators can foster children's confidence in math by inspiring youngsters to experiment with rearranging tiles and exploring different numerical combinations. Together, they'll unveil optimal strategies for maximizing points and cultivating strategic thinking skills.
Explore Gameplay Modification for SimplyFun's Best-Selling Math Game, Sumology!
We love all the excellent feedback for our best-selling math game Sumology! The more diverse the audience and the more often the game is played, the more we want to explore different variations of the game's rules and how we can create rule modifications to make Sumology as inclusive as possible. While none of these ideas are official rules, they were all suggested by the game designer of Sumology, Corne Van Moorsel, and then play-tested by SimplyFun's in-house product development team. As a result, we feel confident you'll love these different variations of the classic rules included in the game. These tips and tricks will be helpful to simplify gameplay, include more players, encourage solo play, or add fun challenges to your family's Sumology experience.
Increasing Gameplay Time When Playing with 3+ Players
To increase the time of gameplay, with 3-4 players or teams, we suggest that at the end of the game (when all blocks are in use) the stock of exchanged blocks be mixed and make a new small stack of blocks. As the number of turns per player can often be reduced when there are more players or teams, we hope this helps add more turns towards the end of the game.
The game can have 35 black chips or so (the original prototype used black beans). Place at the spot in front of the first block of a sum and behind the last block of a sum. This will help identify a better overview of which places aren't possible to build on.
Playing Sumology as a One-Player Game
While we love group play, sometimes you just don’t have enough people. Corne has actually played many games solo, without any rule changes trying to beat his best solo score. That makes tactics very different because the solo player will get all the blocks anyway and has no reason to make large sums to get new blocks faster. Also, the solo player tries to make it possible to use many high digits twice, while with more players and teams you try to avoid the others using many digits from the table. All-in-all that makes it so that the game is quite heavy when you try to reach the best solo score.
Sumology and Cooperative Play
Cooperative play would also easily work by adding the scores of all players, without changing the rules. This would make for an interesting version where, as the single-player game plays, you’re trying to get the best score, but this way, you’d have help. Corne highly suggests trying to play this way if you have varying levels of math skills where everyone can work together.
*Hot Tip!
At the start of the game, 1 '=' gets placed in the middle of the table, but sometimes it isn’t always easy to find the equal sign. We suggest that 1 '=' could be marked at its backside (perhaps with a removable sticker) or even have 2 '=' sides including the 4 diagonal wood edges at both sides of the block. The advantage is that it's easy to find that starting block. We find that sometimes players mix all blocks face-down, and reducing the time it takes to search for an '=' sign means that you can jump into gameplay more quickly.
Behind the Scenes with Sumology's Creator, Corne Van Moorsel
Here you see my handmade *Summy* version (named *Educa* at that time) as I started selling around 1995, and the 2010 *Summy* and your latest (green box) *Sumology*.
- The grey cardboard fiches were for placing at the start and end of sums. This is still handy, but I play *Summy* or *Sumology* without such fiches most times.
- The black and white beans were 1 and 10 points score counters.
- The 5 small black screens were for a maximum of 5 players.
- It had many numbers and signs fiches. (156)
- It had 5 different variants to play, for different ages/math levels.
*The rules for placing sums and counting points were quite a bit different, too, at that time. It's not bad, but it's not as cool as the current version. All improved a lot towards the wooden version!
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