Eleven games come with the deck. Here are ten things to do with it that are not in the rulebook, gathered from watching children who did not ask permission first.
They work with our deck because every card carries a fable animal, its flaw and the virtue that answers it. Several of them work with any deck of cards you own, and I will say which.
1. Snap, but you have to name the flaw
Ordinary snap. The difference is you cannot claim the pair until you say the fault out loud. Boastfulness. Rudeness. It slows the game down just enough to make a four-year-old think, and it turns twenty-six abstract words into things they say at speed.
2. The virtue hunt
Deal five cards face up. Ask which animal had the hardest time. There is no right answer and that is the point. What you get back tells you a surprising amount about the week your child has had.
3. Guess the animal
One child describes the animal without naming it or the fault. The other guesses. This is the game that makes a shy seven-year-old talk for ten minutes, which is not nothing.
4. Song roulette
Every card has a code that opens its song. Shuffle, cut, play whatever comes up. Do it three times and you have a nine-minute concert nobody planned.
5. The morning card
Draw one card at breakfast, without comment. That animal is the animal of the day. Say nothing else about it. Children do the rest of the work themselves, and often at the worst possible moment in front of a guest.
6. Memory, with a rule
Standard pairs, face down. Whoever finds a pair must say what that animal should have done differently. Slower than memory, better than memory.
7. The fixing game
Deal one card. Everybody has thirty seconds to invent a different ending where the animal behaves. The sillier the better. A child who can rewrite a fable understands it better than a child who can recite it.
8. Highest virtue wins
Two cards face up, argue for which virtue is more useful today. Patience or courage. Modesty or honesty. You will lose this argument to a six-year-old at least once, and you should let it happen.
9. Build a story from three
Draw three cards and make one story with all three animals in it. This is the rainy-afternoon one. It goes on longer than you expect and the results are usually unhinged.
10. Ordinary Go Fish
I know I said not Go Fish. But the truth is that a real deck of cards earns its place by playing the games everyone already knows, and the fables do their work quietly in the background while nobody is paying attention to them.
That is the whole design, really. If it only played fable games it would be a toy. Because it is a real fifty-four card deck it plays everything, and it stays in the house.
Which of these work with any deck
Numbers 10 and 6 work with any cards you own. The rest need the faces. If you have an ordinary deck in a drawer, get it out this evening anyway. Nothing on a screen teaches a child to lose gracefully, and an ordinary pack of cards is the cheapest teacher there is.
The deck comes with the full ecosystem, $49.95 during the launch.
Tomorrow, the slow version of all this: one fable a night, twenty-six nights.