Ratio Fill Up (Ratio/Fraction Equivalences)

Here is another game from TMC14.  This is the game that my group worked on so I can take some credit in it's creation.  My group's goal was to create a game about ratios/proportions.  We were thinking of ratio tables and wanting students to see that each ratio was equal to the other.  There are quite a few rules to this game as you can see.  I took the rules straight off of the TMC14 wiki.

Objective: To earn three points [counters] by filling ratio tables with congruent ratios.

Materials: Gameboard with 4 ratios tables with room for 5 ratios in each table,  ratio cards, point counters, calculator.

Set-up: Shuffle ratio cards and deal 5 to each player.

Game play:
1) The first player plays any ratio card from their hand in the blank first space in a ratio table and then draws a card to end his/her turn.
2) The second player can either play an equivalent ratio in the same table as the first player or play a different ratio in one of the empty tables.
3) Play continues with each player playing equivalent ratios to fill up the ratio tables and drawing cards to replace the ratios just played.
4) When a ratio table gets full, whoever played the last ratio into that table gets 1 point, as long as they can identify operations to get from the first ratio played to the last (ie, if the first ratio is 2/8 and the last is 4/16, they could say multiply by 2/2 or divide by 2/2 and multiply by 4/4).
5) The player to the right of the player that played the last ratio will take the calculator and divide out the ratios in order to check to make sure the ratios are all equivalent.
6) Cards from the completed ratio table are put into the discard pile, and the cleared ratio table is open for any player to play in.
7) The first player to 3 points (counters) is the winner.

Other rules:
1) If the draw pile ever runs out, reshuffle the discard pile to create a new draw pile.
2) If a card is played incorrectly the player that noticed the error draws an extra card and the incorrect card is put into the discard pile.
3) Skips, reverses and wilds:

• Skips automatically skip the next player, 
• Reverses switch which order the players play (so, if play is going left at first, it instead goes right), and 
• wilds can be played in any ratio table that already has a ratio in it, but the player who plays it must name an equivalent ratio that isn't already in the table.  

4) If none of the cards from a player's hand can be played on their turn, that player discards one card and draws one card and their turn ends.

OK, this is a lot of rules!  Our group did agree that the game still needed some tweaking, but we just ran out of time.  Also, I am not so sure about the 4th rule.  I'm having trouble seeing the value in doing that.  Maybe when I play it with students I will, but right now I am struggling.  I would rather have my students identify the pattern in the ratio table and figure out how to do that considering that the ratios are not placed in any specific order during play.  What strategy would they use to figure out that there is a scale factor of 2/2?  What discussions or debates would come out of this?  Sometimes the first and last ratios played don't display an easily identifiable pattern and for the lower students, this could cause frustration.  I'll just have to play it and see.

Another thing that I did to modify this was to add labels to the ratio table.  I just felt like if students saw the labels they would not be thinking fractions.  The Power Point below is completely editable, so if you would like to remove those or change them, it is possible. 

Below you will find the gameboard and cards that I made up to use with my students.  The cards are ment to be cut out like fractions.  A more challenging option would be to cut the individual numbers apart and have the students work together to make ratio tables that are true and to explain how they know they are correct.  There is definitely room for tweaking and developing spin-offs of the basic game.

If you play this with students and make modifications, I would love to hear what you did and how it worked for you!