Canadian families have the strangest position in the math games market: every list on the internet almost applies to you. The grade numbers match, the spelling matches, the topics mostly match, and yet the lists are all quietly American, aligned to Common Core, priced in US dollars, and blind to the fact that Ontario rewrote its math curriculum in 2020, that Quebec numbers its school years like a different country, or that half a million Canadian kids do their math in French immersion. This is the version of the list that actually knows Canada exists.
Full disclosure before anything else: this is Infinilearn's blog, we make one of the games below, and the reason this post exists is that we built something specifically for Ontario. Judge those paragraphs with appropriate suspicion.
The good news: no conversion table required
If you read our Australian guide, it opens with a table translating year levels to American grades. Canada gets to skip that entirely. Grade 4 is Grade 4, Grade 7 is Grade 7, and the ages line up. When an American site says "middle school math", that is roughly Grades 6 to 8, and "Algebra 1" is close to Grade 9 math.
The one exception is Quebec, which switches to Secondaire I through V after Grade 6. The mapping is simple: Secondaire I is Grade 7, Secondaire II is Grade 8, Secondaire III is Grade 9. Match by that and any grade-based game works fine.
The Ontario Curriculum, actually supported
Here is our horse in the race. Infinilearn is a free browser-based fantasy RPG for Grades 4 to 9 where students battle monsters and every attack fires by solving a real math problem, and it ships an Ontario Curriculum mode: when a teacher sets up a class, they can pick the Ontario Curriculum as the standards path instead of Common Core, and practice follows the topics as Ontario organizes them. That matters more than it used to, because the 2020 elementary curriculum and the de-streamed Grade 9 course reshuffled what lands in which grade, and a game aligned to the American sequence will occasionally practise next year's topic or skip this year's.
For families outside Ontario, the honest advice is that it matters less than the marketing implies. BC, Alberta, and the rest sequence some topics differently, but a Grade 6 kid grinding fractions, ratios, and decimals is doing Grade 6 math in every province; pick the grade, and the adaptive engine (which tracks accuracy topic by topic and sends more of the weak ones into battles) sorts out the rest. The whole game is free with no ads and nothing paywalled; premium (US$9.99 a month, and yes, that is US dollars, sorry) adds cosmetics and a deeper parent dashboard. Chat is preset phrases only. It runs in any browser, including on an iPad; there is no phone app yet, and problems are multiple choice.
One more Ontario-specific note: EQAO tests math in Grades 3, 6, and 9. Everything we said to Australian parents about NAPLAN applies here word for word. You cannot cram for a skills test; you can spend the months before it quietly patching the weak topics, which is the one job an adaptive game is actually good at.
The rest of the field
- Prodigy. A fun fact most parents do not know: the biggest math RPG in the world is Canadian, built in southern Ontario. It covers Grades 1 to 8 with a strong elementary lean, the math is free, and the motivational layer (pets, gear, member areas) is behind a paid membership. For a Grade 2 or 3 kid it is the obvious choice and too young for us to compete for; for middle schoolers it starts reading as a little-kid game, which is a whole topic we've written about.
- Khan Academy. Free and genuinely excellent, with full course paths that track provincial content closely enough. It is school in website form, not a game. Works beautifully for the self-driven kid; does nothing for the kid who needs to be tricked into practising.
- IXL. Subscription drill practice with province-aligned skill lists, which is a real advantage. Kids rate it somewhere between homework and extra homework. Effective if your child will tolerate it; many will not, and there is no game layer to soften it.
The French immersion question
If your child does math in French, an English math game is practising the skills in the wrong language, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what that means. The symbols, the procedures, and the number sense transfer completely; a kid who can solve 3x + 5 = 20 can solve it in any language. The vocabulary does not transfer, and word problems in English will not teach them what "pourcentage de rabais" means on Thursday's test. Our take: English practice is still real practice, and for immersion families it quietly doubles as English reading, but if vocabulary is the struggle, the fix is a French word-problem workbook, not more of any English app.
Bottom line
Canada does not need a special math game; it needs the regular ones with the labels read correctly. Grade numbers transfer as-is, Quebec parents subtract six, Prodigy is the local giant for the younger years, Khan is the free workhorse for the motivated, and if you want the RPG where the whole game is free and there is an actual Ontario Curriculum toggle, that one is ours.