The Counting Kingdom arrived among a batch of different releases sent to us at once. As we divvied up the games to cover, it quickly became apparent that nobody was exactly leaping on the “math puzzler”. Since I’ve garnered a reputation of taking all the best games for myself and giving Jay games that are better forgotten about, I figured I would throw myself upon this educational grenade….and it actually went pretty well.
HI BILLY DO YOU WANT TO DO SOME MATH WITH ME?!
Uh oh, monsters are invading your kingdom. That’s the game’s opening cutscene in a nutshell. There’s not much going on by ways of plot in this game, nor does there really have to be. There are monsters, and they need to be defeated with mathematics, deal with it.
The game’s board is made up of a 4×4 grid. On the left side of the board rests your castle, and from the right side of the board you’ll find your unwelcome visitors shuffling in. Each turn you’re given three cards with numbers on them. The monsters adorning the level will also have numbers attached to them. Your goal is to select monsters that touch one another until they add up to one of your cards on the left. Once you’ve got a selection that works, you drop a spell on the monsters and they’re cleared from the board. If you’re unable to clear monsters they’ll slowly be pushed towards your castle as new infantry arrives. Once all four pieces of your castle have taken damage it’s game over.
As you progress through the game’s 30 or so levels you’ll find plenty of different challenges being added in as you enter new zones on the world map. These range from things like a randomly placed tile on the battlefield that will double a monster’s size, to potions that have different effects like adding and removing value from monsters, or even turning a monster into a zero, effectively clearing it from the board.
I’ve never been a particular math wiz, and as the game’s difficulty increased I did find myself resorting to counting on my fingers now and then, but most of the game was pretty smooth sailing. I didn’t clear a level with less than the full 3 stars until well into the halfway point of the game. For a child the difficulty is probably spot on, but for me the early stretches of the game were a bit too easy to be wholly entertaining.
Yes, you read it here first, I am smarter than children.
Here I am dropping math bombs on some mofos.
Educational games are tough, learning has a tendency to feel like work, and games are supposed to be the exact opposite. Growing up, my school’s computer lab had plenty of educational games, but ask anybody my age what their favorite was and they’ll always veer towards the more “gamey” stuff like Oregon Trail. And really what did Oregon Trail teach you about beyond dysentery? That’s why it’s kind of a big deal when I say that The Counting Kingdom is one of the best educational games I’ve played. As I progressed deeper and deeper into the game I actually found myself solving problems faster, and at no point did it really feel like work.
I do have a couple small issues with the game, those being price and platform. This is really meant to be played on a tablet of some kind and it sounds like the developer does have plans for an iOS release later this year. The $9.99 asking price can also feel a little steep. If the game’s difficulty was a little stronger than I might have felt like I got more value out of it as I played through, instead you can pretty much finish the whole thing in a couple hours time.
Of course all that feedback goes out the window if you have children, and ultimately I think that’s what I’m going to slant the review score towards. The graphics are a perfect cartoony mix that kids are going to love, and the game does a really good job at making you feel like you got better at math without sitting through a mind numbing course. If you have a kid like young me, who loves video games and hates himself some mathematics The Counting Kingdom could be a great solution to that problem.
This game was reviewed using review code provided to us by the publisher.
