Prime Climb

Like everyone else right now, we’re trapped at home doing our best to keep our kids entertained. For our family, this has meant quite a bit of playing board and card games. In the past couple of weeks we’ve played many games of Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Bohnanza, and Flux among others. To mix it up a bit, I ordered Prime Climb from Amazon. It had been sitting in my Wish List for a while now; and this seemed like a good time to try it out.

Given our level of boredom, it didn’t take much convincing to get my son Taj to play a game with me the day it arrived. Getting the game setup was very quick and getting our first game going was easy. Sadly, our first game ended early when I realized I had one of the rules incorrect (Taj: “I told you so Dad!”). But after that false start Taj and I really got into it. It’s a surprisingly subtle game, and there’s no clear person winning until the game is won. We found the rules well balanced and fun. Probably the most fun we both had was pointing out the much better move the other player could have made once their turn was done.

All that’s really needed to play this game is a simple understanding of arithmetic. In that way the game is very approachable; and not a bad refresher of basic operations on mid-sized numbers. But certainly those with a intuitive understanding of the relationship between numbers have a small advantage in play.

Our first, aborted, game took about 10 minutes. While we did have the rules slightly wrong during this game; that was enough “training” time for Taj and I to develop some skill. Our second game was about 20 minutes, and involved some laughing and excitement.

Overall, I would definitely recommend the game to anyone fond of board games. But I think it might be a special pleasure for those gamers with an affinity for the art of mathematics.