Sleeping Queens is one of the favorite card games of my students from kindergarten through middle school. One 2nd grader told me she asked her parents to buy it and played every night with her stuffed animals! The kids love the crazy pictures and the fact that the game involves stealing cards from other players. As a parent or teacher you can use the game as designed to teach/practice addition/subtraction and equivalent equations. With just a little variation you can include fact families, unknown numbers (intro to variables,) or even multiplication/division.
How to play:
In the game, 12 queens are “sleeping,” with their cards face down in the middle. Players are dealt 5 cards each. On their turn they can do one of the following:
- Play a king card to wake up a queen (the queen goes face up in front of the player and has a point value)
- Play a knight card to steal someone else’s queen (but if that player has a dragon card they can play it to save their queen)
- Play a sleeping potion to put another player’s queen back to sleep (but if that player has a magic wand card they can play it to save their queen)
- Play a jester (a “take a chance” card). Turn the first card of the draw pile over. If it is a picture card the player gets to keep it. If a number card the player counts all players starting with himself, and when he gets to the number on the card that player gets to wake a queen.
- Trade in a card they don’t want. Number cards are useless so you want to exchange them. You can exchange a single number card OR you can create an addition or subtraction equation with your cards and trade in more than one. For example if you have 2, 5, and 7 you can say “2 + 5= 7” and trade in all 3 cards. You could also do equivalents like 3 + 4= 5 +2. My teaching assistant used to use a number balance with this game to teach “balanced equations.” With older kids I let them also make multiplication/division equations or sometimes even create exponents.
After choosing their play, the player draws new cards to replace all cards played. If the draw pile runs out reshuffle it and continue play.
Ways to add a little extra math practice
The game ends according to the official rules at a certain number of points (40 or 50 depending on number of players.) In reality the kids usually want to play until all the queens are taken. Then they get additional math practice adding their points and comparing the total to other players. Lead the kids through different addition strategies for adding their points.
Ask them questions like “Sam has 40 points and Sarah has 32, who has more? How much did he win by?“ Better yet, ask “what is the difference between their two scores?” This ties in the understanding of subtraction as difference, a super important concept I talk about in this post. “If we add everyone’s points together how many are there in all?”
Sometimes we even write math stories or word problems about our kings, queens, dragons, and knights. The kings and queens have funny names (Pancake Queen, Rainbow Queen, Tie Dye King, Cookie King) and pictures that make writing the stories fun.
New Versions
The Sleeping Queens Deluxe 10th Anniversary version comes in a tin box, includes character stickers, and adds in 4 new queens. The new Strawberry Queen has a special power where she cannot be stolen or put to sleep.
Sleeping Queens 2: The Rescue.
In this game the queens must team up with animal companions to rescue the kings. This game also includes gnomes, a switch witch, spell books and sleeping willows. I would personally have preferred these elements not be brought in.
Sleeping Queens 2 is a much more complex game as far as rules, and requires more strategy. My students and I found the rules much more confusing and harder to keep straight. Once they got the game play down, most of them enjoyed it, but it is not the crowd pleasing favorite the original is. I was also surprised that though the rules are more complex and there is more strategy involved, the math is not more complex. In fact one of my favorite ways to develop elementary math skills with the first game (mentally adding to find the point value of the queens, and then using subtraction to find the difference between players’ scores) is completely eliminated in this game. You just have to have a certain number of kings to win.
My recommendation is to stick with the original game (though I would buy the anniversary edition)