Osmo-Math Wizard and the Secrets of the Dragons

My six year old received Osmo (for the I Pad) for Christmas and I just added this game to our collection. This is by far his favorite one. He played it for about an hour and a half the first time and kept saying "This is so cool!" when he would make a potion. Today he asked to play this game instead of asking to watch videos or play video games. This is a complete win in my book. The set comes with a small board, small plastic squares and long ten-frame squares, and a potions booklet that kids put stickers in as they learn new potion recipes. The set overall isn't as nice as the starter kits and doesn't come with nice plastic storage boxes for the small plastic pieces. It's all stored in a cardboard box with a magnetic lid that seems okay but just isn't as nice as the plastic storage boxes we've gotten in other sets. For $60 I would expect a little nicer storage, but it's not a deal breaker for me. The actual games are really fun, according to my son. For the potions game, kids need to add certain ingredients in certain amounts. So in one column they might need two purple feathers and in the second column three mushrooms. Then they need "sparkles" to make the potion work. You need one sparkle for every ingredient, so they need to add up their ingredients to figure out how many sparkles are needed. It's done in such a way that it's pretty easy for them to miss that they're actually doing math, and it really just feels like a cool game. As they help more characters by giving them potions, they receive "joy" (in the form of points) that can unlock other rooms and items inside the room. These other games work much the same way and again feel more like just a fun game than actual math. I did need to be close by for some parts, as my son can't read yet and for some reason not all of the dialogue is spoken aloud. If your kid is a good reader then they can probably manage this game on their own. The math gets more difficult as your kid progresses, and after a couple hours we're already learning new things. I actually used this as math instruction since we're homeschooling this year due to Covid. My kid thought he was getting to play instead of doing school, which was great for both of us. So overall, this is totally worth it and if you're on the fence at all I'd say go for it. Is it overpriced for what you get? Yes, probably so. Is it worth the money? For me it is. I think it depends on how much use your kid will get out of this and how much they enjoy it. For us, this was a home run and I really hope they make more games like this one for Osmo.