Faery's Tale Deluxe

Catherine and I started reading Faery's Tale Deluxe today. This is going to be part of our summer fun and will include my nephew who will be coming over once school ends in two weeks, so we're getting familiar with it now.

The first thing I read was part one of a story that runs through the book. It's sort of an introduction to the world of the game and gives the kids a flavour of how the game will run. We then went on to read the summaries of the the characters the kids can choose to be: pixies, brownies, sprites and pookas. Sprites don't have magic but they are warriors and form close bonds with animals friends so, of course, that's what Catherine wants to be.

Catherine was already drawing as I read, designing her character and thinking about what other classes of faeries we could design and bring into the game. I'm optimistic that storytelling will follow, maybe written stories.

I'm also wondering about how this might benefit the kids beyond writing and drawing. Faery's Tale deals with the world in miniature. All of the characters that the children can choose to be are no more than a few inches tall. If they're out playing in the yard or going for a walk will they start looking at the details of plants, at the tiny animals, at the pebbles and twigs to try and understand the scale of the world their alter egos live in? Heck, could we collect some of the things they find and construct figurines their characters? The houses they might live in?

It'll be interesting to look back on this in the fall and see where it's taken the kids and I.