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Description:
Watto's shop is full of spaceship parts, all waiting to be mixed up as you design a fast-flying salvage ship to retrieve junk from space. Trouble is, you're short of credits--and Watto's prices are high. That's where Jabba the Hutt comes in: within his personal casino of games of chance and strategy, you can attempt to earn enough credit to build some new wings and go flying. Star Wars Math: Jabba's Game Galaxy is designed to challenge and develop a wide range of strategic, mathematical, and geometric skills through a series of well-crafted games. In Dueling Dice, players practice addition in a variation on blackjack: they try to reach exactly 30 droids without overshooting. Holochex pits you against Jabba the Hutt in checkers games on different-shaped boards that use monsters instead of static game pieces; though more simple than chess, it is complex enough to hold players' interest at length. And in Digotto, players try to create a lowest or highest number, digit by digit, and decide where to place each number as it is generated. The last game is Ratt's Race, a board game that poses basic computation and geometry challenges. Once you have the credits in hand, it's off to Watto's junk shop to purchase parts for your ship. Careful, though: you must balance the various engineering requirements within your limited budget. In the ship hangar, you can actually put the ship together. After that, you can leave Tatooine and clean up space junk in the wider galaxy. As math games go, Jabba's Game Galaxy is quite challenging. The random element of most featured games (Ratt's Race is the big exception and the big moneymaker) makes it impossible for even skilled players to be guaranteed regular victories; winning enough money to assemble a ship requires significant time and effort. Though some of the animations are repetitive and slow down play, the overall quality of the graphics and sound is excellent. The range of activities gives the game wide appeal--especially for boys, who may relate better to the all-male cast of characters--and the pseudo-gambling milieu is mitigated somewhat by the use of Star Wars villains (as opposed to the more lovable characters) in this slightly shady setting. (Ages 6 to 9) --Alyx Dellamonica
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