What’s your favorite board game? Do you love to take your chances in the game of Life? Are you an aspiring doctor who loves Operation? Are you sweet on Candy Land?

Board games aren’t just a fun way to pass the time, they’re also a great opportunity for the entire family to practice math skills together! This is especially true of games using dice or dominoes, but ANY game can stretch your math muscles. You don’t have to know the game to give this week’s Monopoly-themed word problem a try. It’s deceptively simple, but be careful! Attention to detail can mean the difference between “Free Parking” and “Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail…” 😉

Each side of a Monopoly board has 11 spaces from one corner to the next. How many spaces are there around the whole board?

Take your time and think it over. When you're ready, check your solution below.

Solution: Even though each side has 11 spaces, there aren’t 44 spaces because we’d be counting each corner twice. To find the number of spaces around the board, we only count one of the corners for each side, leaving 10 spaces to count for each side. That’s 10 × 4 = 40 spaces.