The Factor Game from the Connected Mathematics project is a game that exercises your factoring ability.

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Instructions

The goal of the game:

How do you score:

For example in the 30 Game, say you get the first move (i.e. nothing has been selected yet) and you click on the number 30. In that case you get 30 points. But the factors of 30 are: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 15. They add up to 42, so that is your opponent's score for that move. Maybet you'd want to try something else.

OK, so you've chose 29 instead. You get 29 points and your opponent only gets 1 (29 is prime and its only factor is 1). This is much better.

That suggests you should pick big primes all the time. So now, you are player 2, and following this advice, you click on 23. Do you now reap a bunch of points?

No. And what's more you've just lost your turn. Player 1 now gets two turns.

What happened? You've run afoul of the only other rule in the game: If there are no available factors for a number you cannot pick it. If you try to do so you will lose your turn.

So instead of 23 you should pick some other number, like 22. If you do that you get 22 points. The factors of 22 are 1, 2 and 11. But one was already used (see it is high lighted with player 1's color) so it doesn't count. So your opponent only gets 13 points (2 plus 11).

So to recap. When it is your turn you pick a number. If that number has unused factors, you get that number as your score and your opponent gets the sum of the unused factors as his or her score.

If there are no available factors you don't get anything, plus you lose your next turn.

Administrative Trivia

That's it except for some administrative issues to deal with.

First you can play against another person, or you can play against the computer. If you play against another person, just trade the mouse back and forth. If you play against the computer, the computer will make its moves between your clicks. Just as an aside the computer uses a pretty good strategy, but it can be beat. Think about what you're doing and figure out how it works

There are also 3 versions of the game available. The first is the 100 game, which has a 10 by 10 square. There are also 49 and 30 games. They all work the same way, but the smaller games are easier to figure out at first. Just click on the game choice and pick which one you want to play.

That's about it. Just enjoy the games. If you would like help or would like to make suggestions contact me at burgisr@hotmail.com or go to cmpGames to see other games and to contribute to the discussion there.

Game and instructions © 1997, 2000 by Richard Burgis