I will tell you why there is a deck of cards in a children's book set, and it is not the reason you would guess.
It is because a book gets read at bedtime and a deck of cards gets played at four in the afternoon, on the floor, by two children who are otherwise about to start a war. Different hour, different problem, same twenty-six animals.
It is a real deck
Fifty-four cards. Four suits, the whole thing, plus jokers. You could deal a hand of rummy with it and nothing would look odd except the pictures.
That was deliberate. The moment a deck stops being a real deck, it becomes a toy that only does the one thing printed on the box, and it goes in the cupboard by February. A real deck plays every game anyone in your house already knows.
What is on the faces
Every card carries three things: the fable animal, the flaw it belongs to, and the virtue that answers the flaw.
That third one matters more than the first two. It is easy to write a book about faults and leave a child with nothing but a list of ways to be wrong. Naming the virtue beside the flaw gives them somewhere to go. Boastfulness sits next to modesty. Impatience sits next to waiting. The child is not being told off, they are being shown a door.
The code that opens the song
Each card also has a code on it. Type it in and the song for that fable plays.
This turned out to be the feature children find on their own, usually within an hour, and then use to bypass the adult entirely. A five-year-old who cannot yet read a sentence can absolutely copy six characters off a card to make a song happen. I have watched it. It is slightly humbling.
Eleven games come with it
Some are versions of games you know, retuned so the fables do something. Some are ours. They range from a two-minute matching game for a four-year-old to something a seven and a nine-year-old can argue over properly.
You will not need all eleven. Every family lands on two or three and plays those into the ground, and that is fine. The other eight are there so you have somewhere to go when the favourite wears out.
The real argument for cards
Nothing on a screen has ever taught a child to lose gracefully.
I do not say that as a man who dislikes screens, I built twenty-six browser games for this project and I am proud of them. But a game against a screen has no face on the other side of it. A game against your brother has a face, and it is making an expression, and learning to keep playing anyway is one of the more useful things a six-year-old can pick up in a year.
The deck is where that happens. The book is where the words come from. That is the division of labour and it is why they ship together.
Where to get it
The deck comes as part of the full ecosystem, $49.95 during the launch and shipping from 12 September. It is not sold on its own, for the same reason the songs are not sold on their own: the code on the card has to open something.
Tomorrow is launch day and the first boxes go out. In the meantime, the colouring posters are free and you can have all twenty-six today.