This Slay the Spire-like made to teach a dev’s daughter maths looks like the best edutainment game I never had

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you’re like me, you probably have at least one treasured memory of being allowed to play an edutainment game at school under the guise of learning. What a blast, getting to play video games at school! For me, it was a floppy disk with a bizarre Pac-Man clone where you had to answer maths questions every time you ran into an enemy or obstacle. I’m sure for others it might be unforgiving classic Oregon Trail or globetrotting trivia quiz Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

While I treasure that memory dearly, I knew even then that the game I was playing was more than a bit crap - no matter how good it made me at sums or let me get out of doing normal schoolwork. If only the next game from chess-roguelike Shotgun King developers Punkcake Délicieux had existed at the time, offering up a modern bit of edutainment that looks to be both educational and genuinely fun to play.

The game is yet to have a name officially revealed, though in-game cards visible in a GIF shared to X suggest it might be called Algebrawl, which is a pretty top-notch pun if so.

Punkcake Délicieux’s Benjamin Soule - half of the studio’s development team alongside Rémy Devaux, joined by composer Pentadrangle - said that the game started life last November as a way to teach the developer’s seven-year-old daughter addition and multiplication, before developing into a full release for the studio.

Even from the short GIF, it’s easy to see the appeal. The clip’s adorable pixel art shows a sword-wielding boar creature in a crown and robe - presumably the player - leading a group of small mice and boar followers into battle against a group of slime and goblin-like creatures, much like an encounter in Slay the Spire.

In November I made a game to train my 7yo