Introduction to the DaMath Board Game Part 1

DaMath is a math board game coined from the word dama, a Filipino checker game, and mathematics. It was invented by Jesus Huenda, a high school teacher from Sorsogon, Philippines. It became very popular in the 1980s and until now played in many schools in the Philippines.

DaMath can be used to practice the four fundamental operations and also the order of operations. It has numerous variations, but in the tutorial below, we will discuss the Integers DaMath. Note that explaining this game is quite complicated, so I have divided the tutorial into three posts.

The DaMath Board

The board is composed of 64 squares in alternating black and white just like the chessboard. The four basic mathematical operations are written on white squares as shown in Figure 1. Each square is identified by a (column, row) notation. The top-left square, for example, is in column 0 and row 7, so it is denoted by (0,7).  » Read more