Somewhere around Year 7, British kids stop getting maths games and start getting maths homework platforms. Primary school has Times Tables Rock Stars and a whiteboard full of Hit the Button; secondary school has a login your child resents. If you have gone looking for something in between, something a Year 8 kid would open voluntarily on a Tuesday evening, you have probably ended up on American sites talking about "6th grade" and "Algebra 1" and quietly closed the tab. This guide is the decoder ring, plus an honest tour of what is worth your evening.
Cards on the table first: this is the blog of Infinilearn, a free maths RPG that features below. We are American-made and we will be upfront about exactly how American further down.
The decoder ring: years to grades
England and Wales start counting a year earlier than the US, so every American grade is your year minus one. The ages are the reliable part; when a site asks for a grade, this is the table to use.
| England & Wales | Age | US grade |
|---|---|---|
| Year 5 | 9 to 10 | 4th grade |
| Year 6 | 10 to 11 | 5th grade |
| Year 7 | 11 to 12 | 6th grade |
| Year 8 | 12 to 13 | 7th grade |
| Year 9 | 13 to 14 | 8th grade |
| Year 10 | 14 to 15 | 9th grade |
Scotland runs P1 to P7 and then S1 onward, and Northern Ireland's years run one higher again (the first year of secondary is Year 8 there). Rather than memorise three more mappings, just use the age column; it works everywhere.
Does American maths even match the curriculum here? At these ages, largely yes. Fractions, percentages, ratio, algebra, angles, probability: the KS2 and KS3 programmes of study and the American sequence climb the same ladder in nearly the same order. Nobody's American game will rehearse the exact wording of a SATs reasoning paper, but the skills underneath are the same skills.
The KS3 problem
Here is the opinionated part. Years 7 to 9 are where maths enthusiasm goes to die quietly. Primary school gamified everything and celebrated every times table; then secondary hands your child Sparx or MyMaths homework, the class moves faster, nobody hands out certificates any more, and by Year 9 "I'm just not a maths person" has hardened into an identity. The homework platforms are fine at what they do. What they are not is anything a child would ever touch beyond the assigned minutes, and the assigned minutes are not enough to fix a wobbly foundation. The gap in the UK market is the voluntary evening: something with actual gravitational pull that happens to be maths underneath.
What the UK already does well
- Times Tables Rock Stars. Genuinely excellent at its one job. If your child is still shaky on tables, do this first; everything in secondary maths leans on that fluency. Its job is finished by early secondary though, and it does not pretend otherwise.
- Hit the Button. Free, instant, brilliant for five-minute bursts of number facts. Same ceiling: it is fluency practice, not the curriculum.
- Sparx Maths and MyMaths. Your child's school probably uses one. They are homework delivery systems, and treating them as also-the-fun-part is how kids come to hate both. Let them be homework.
- Khan Academy. Free, thorough, American but easily mapped with the table above. For a motivated GCSE-bound teenager it is a gift. It has never once been described as a game.
Where we fit, American accent and all
Infinilearn is a browser-based fantasy RPG where every attack, spell, and boss fight fires by solving a real maths problem, pitched at exactly the band the UK market forgets: ages 9 to 15, which is Year 5 to Year 10 here. The entire game is free with no ads and nothing paywalled; premium (US$9.99 a month) buys cosmetics and a deeper parent dashboard, and a free player has the whole game. It adapts, tracking accuracy topic by topic and steering battles toward the weak spots, and a free parent dashboard shows you what all the questing is building. Multiplayer chat is preset phrases only.
Now the American accent, stated plainly: it says "grade" instead of "year" (hence the table), the spelling is American, prices are in dollars, and there is no UK curriculum mode the way there is an Australian one, so a Year 6 parent hoping for SATs-style reasoning papers should keep the workbooks. What you are getting is the underlying skills ladder, delivered inside a game with enough pull to win a Tuesday evening. It runs in any modern browser including on an iPad, with nothing to install; problems are multiple choice and there is no phone app yet.
A note for Year 10 and beyond
Our content tops out around 9th grade, which overlaps the start of GCSE foundation content but will not carry a Year 11 through the higher paper. For a Year 10 with gaps, playing through the earlier material is exactly the right medicine, because GCSE grades are mostly lost on Year 7 and 8 skills that never set properly. For a Year 11 in revision mode, use a proper GCSE resource; this is not that, and we would rather tell you so than have you find out in March.