We do mentoring with grade school and middle school kids. One of the perks of that is that we get to play games (learning games mind you) with the kids. When they don’t have homework we drag out the game bag. Boggle is a great favorite as is Scrabble. But there are two most requested games. Mastermind is one – the code breaking game which is still generally available. Mastermind teaches logical and focused thinking.

The other most requested is 24. The object of 24 is to manipulate 4 numbers from 1 to 9 using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to come up with 24. Not 23, not 25, but 24. You win when you think you have figured out how to get twenty-four and you can explain it to your competitors

One of the neat things about this for me is that I do not have to list the answers this week. The answer to questions 1 to 20 is 24.

Here is an example: 7, 2, 5, 7. You can only use a number once. You can go over 24 and then subtract or divide to reduce it to 24. Many have more than one answer.
Answer: (5*2) = 10 + 7 = 17 + 7 = 24.
The questions will be starred from * to *** to indicate difficulty.
I will take the numbers from our game. I think we will up the questions to 20 for today. Here we go:

1)  **        9, 5, 3, 3

2)  *         6, 2, 2, 8

3)  *         8, 7, 8, 1

4)  **       6, 9, 1, 2

5)  ***     6, 9, 6, 5

6)  **       1, 3, 5, 9

7)  **       9, 4, 2, 1

8)  *        5, 1, 2, 9

9)  **      1, 4, 7, 7

10) ***   7, 7, 7, 4

11) *        4, 8, 7, 5

12) ***    7, 2, 4, 9

13) **      5, 4, 3, 3

14) **      3, 2, 4, 5

15) ***    6, 1, 4, 7

16) *        1, 2, 7, 2

17) ***    4, 4, 4, 3

18) **      6, 8, 7, 2

19) ***    2, 5, 4, 5

20) ***   7, 5, 5, 4

We found this game about 20 years ago and have never seen it for sale since. BTW – don’t play this with an engineer. They have heads like computers. My son-in-law is one.