The warehouse
Sort the boxes, fill the trucks, and save up for a faster forklift
The warehouse is a roomy 3D building with a conveyor belt bringing in boxes, shelves along the back wall, a forklift in its parking box and trucks waiting at the dock. Your child never has to steer. They tap a box, and the forklift drives over and lifts it; they tap a shelf or a truck, and it drives there and puts the box down.
Each box has a big picture (a ball, a teddy, an apple, a car, a book or a star), a color and, later, a size. First the boxes go onto shelves by their sign. Then trucks arrive with a picture list on the order board (“This truck needs two balls. And one teddy.”), each box is counted out loud as it lands (“One ball! Two balls!”), and a full truck toots and drives off.
A wrong shelf is never a mistake on screen. The box stays on the forklift, the voice says what it is (“That’s a blue ball!”, “This truck doesn’t need a car.”) and the right shelf or truck wiggles. Every job puts a gold coin in the jar, from the very first round.
How it plays
Five boxes onto three color shelves, each shelf painted its color. Then balls with balls and teddies with teddies, with the colors mixed so the picture is what counts. Red and green are never the two colors to sort between, because about one boy in twelve can’t tell them apart.
Four shelves: red balls, blue balls, red cars and blue cars, or big and little balls and cars. Each box fits exactly one shelf, so your child has to look at two things at once before choosing where it goes.
First come one-box orders (“A teddy for this truck!”), then orders of up to five boxes in two or three kinds, ticked off and counted as they load. One too many is stopped with “We have enough balls!”, so counting to the right number is what fills the truck.
The order needs five, but the shelf has three: “How many more do we need?” Your child picks a number on the delivery board, and a wrong one says what it would make (“Three and three make six. That’s too many!”). Later the forklift carries three boxes and two trucks wait; dashed rings show the fewest trips, and doing it in that many earns a bonus star.
Trucks now pay for every box: balls, apples and books one coin, cars and teddies two, stars and ducks three. The shop sells a faster forklift (6 coins), paint (10), a shelf of rubber ducks (15) and a second dock (20). Tapping something your child can’t afford yet says how many more coins it needs and makes it the saving goal.
Skills
The thinking
Sorting by one property and then by two (classification) and matching objects one to one are core early math skills between four and six; they are steps in the early math learning trajectories (Clements & Sarama 2009), and one-to-one correspondence is the first of the counting principles (Gelman & Gallistel 1978). “We have three, we need five” is a missing-addend problem, which young children solve by counting on before they are taught subtraction (Carpenter & Moser 1984). Planning fewer trips is planning ahead, an executive-function skill that grows quickly from four to seven (Luciana & Nelson 1998).
Saving coins for a bigger upgrade practices waiting for a bigger reward, which depends on trusting that the reward will come (Kidd, Palmeri & Aslin 2013). So the shop keeps its promises: prices never change, coins are never lost, and buying or saving is always your child’s choice. Real saving strategies are hard for young children and develop slowly through the school years (Sonuga-Barke & Webley 1993), so this is a gentle start, not a lesson. To be honest about it: this is practice of these skills in play, not a business course, and nobody has shown that a game like this makes children better at them elsewhere.
Away from the screen
Ideas to carry the game into everyday life, no screen needed.
Sort the laundry together: first by color, then by color and whose it is.
Unpack the groceries onto shelves by kind: fruit here, cans there.
Set the table and ask how many more forks you need: “We have three, we need five.”
Keep a real coin jar for a small goal, with a picture of the goal on it, and count the coins together now and then.
FAQ
It opens from age 5, based on your child’s birth month, and a parent can show it earlier or hide it. The first rung is simple color sorting; numbers and coins come in gradually.
Nothing goes wrong on screen. The box stays on the forklift, the voice says what it is, and the right shelf or truck wiggles. A box that doesn’t belong is never picked up, so there is nothing to undo.
Only gently. Coins are earned for jobs in the game and spent in the warehouse’s own shop on things like a faster forklift. Each price is a row of coin spaces filled from the jar, so “enough” and “how many more” can be seen.
Not as a written sum. The stock check asks “How many more do we need?”, which children this age solve by counting on, a step before subtraction is taught.
Guides
Simple math games for 3–6-year-olds: counting objects, a straight-line board game, ten-frames, making ten, comparing, sorting and patterns, with age tips.
Read the guide
More to explore
Pack what the trip needs, make room for a toy, and count coins at the shop.
Spoken from the first tap, no reading needed, no ads, and progress that stays on your iPad.
