State Mates - Educational Board Game - STEM Authenticated - Ages 11 and up - Fun Learning Game - Learn State Locations on Every Turn in This Strategy Filled US Geography Game Made in USA

Our whole family enjoys playing this game. Our kids like taking turns playing the banker (helps with maths too) and it’s helped them with geography. We’ve found it to be pretty adaptable to the age range of our kids.

This game is interesting. In some ways, it is similar to Monopoly. You make your way around the board/states by rolling some unique dice and then calculating how many state moves that will be, then deciding if you want to buy the state or not. Similar to monopoly, you'll be buying basically everything you land on, though with this game you have more control over where you go and what you are buying. It doesn't take too long to make your way from one side of the country to the other, and you have a lot of flexibility where you land, so you won't often get stuck landing on your opponent's state. It was fun to collect a growing pile of states, watching your empire expand similarly to Monopoly.My biggest complaint about this game is actually what makes the game unique: all the random details on each card about the state's industries and production. It seems to be an important part of the game, and how you calculate your bonus (or fee) depending on what card you draw each turn. But from a gameplay standpoint, it just ends up being some math you have to do to calculate a number that usually benefits you (but can sometimes hurt you). Most of the time, we ended up just ignoring those details and just guessing what the number might be and moving on. Of course this defeats the purpose of having all the state details, but that part of the game wasn't fun to us and we ended up ignoring it.If you are playing this educationally (such as in a classroom or for variety in homeschool), I'm sure it is interesting enough to keep students occupied and following the instructions. However, it clearly wasn't designed for pure entertainment. From an entertainment standpoint, I'll give it 3 stars. However, since it is advertized as an educational game, I'll give it 4 stars from the perspective.

This is a fun and educational game IF you can figure out the instructions. The instructions are not very clear and we ended up having to make up some of our own rules as we played. It is good quality and fit well into our homeschool curriculum. If they improve the instructions it would be a great value for a fun and educational game.

This game is somewhat like Monopoly but for geography. There are a lot of instructions and they can be difficult to understand at first, even for adults. It details the game play but it is very vague on how to start the game. It just says to auction off the valuable properties. It doesn't really work for 2 people (my son and I). It may work better if there are more players. It was a slow start the first time playing, but we got the hang of it. It does help my son learn the states and their locations. It doesn't really help him learn the assets and liabilities. Those are just used to determine how much money is received or paid. Instead of using the play log, it would be better to have some chips that match the pawn colors. The chips would be a easier way to identify who owns which states instead of having to check the play log. It would have been an added bonus if the state capitals were printed on the board or on the cards, to help kids learn those as well.

Being a homeschooling family, we like to play a lot of educational games. This one was the perfect addition to our home. It helps kids to learn where the states are. It also helps with math skills as they have to pay and receive large amounts of money. If I had any complaint about this game, one of my complaints is the fact that the money is in billions is a little confusing for my second and fourth grader but we talked about how the denominations could really just be thought about as normal hundreds. They were able to catch on fairly quickly after that.The game looks a little confusing when you first pull it out and read the directions but once we started playing, we all picked it up very quickly. The goal of the game is to get the most money and to match states with their pairs. When you land on your state, you draw a receive or a pay card and you match any of your assets or liabilities to see what you will receive from the bank or what large amount you may need to pay the bank. If you own both matched pairs of states, then you receive twice the amount of money or you just pay that combined sum of the money if you have to pay, you don’t have to pay double thank goodness my daughter was so concerned about that her first time around. Ha ha. You also get bonus points for each state you visit and the player with the most states visited gets 100 bonus points. 75 point bonuses awarded for a set number of states purchased depending upon the amount of players playing the game.Having an auction at the beginning of the game to decide who gets what states was a little tricky at first for my children, but they quickly caught on as to how much they should, and shouldn’t spend so they had money to play later on in the game. The auction picture on the bottom of the game board didn’t really make sense to us as we all just verbally say how much you’d like to pay but I guess I could see where it would work if players just placed their pieces on what their bid was for each state. The triangular dice were also a little bit different for us as we used to playing with square dice, but my girls were able to quickly catch on to how to out of their points and how much the days total equal to how many states they could travel.I thin the only the thing that could have made this game even better was to incorporate the state capitals in some way to also work on capital recognition as well.Over all though happy with our purchase and an interesting and fun educational game to play.