Story Cards

Today I would like to pinpoint a great game about Literature which tries to inspire students to read more books. I think it is a great concept 🙂

Developer: Preloaded and Amplify

Genre: Puzzle (collectible card game)

Educational purpose: Literature, raising interest in book reading

Target audience: K-12

H&H taxonomy class: Literature, Heritage Awareness

Release date: 2014

Platforms: Android, iOS (Tablet)

Web: http://preloaded.com/games/story-cards/

Story Cards is a CCG (Collectible Card Game) featuring famous characters and authors from literature, designed to inspire students to read more books. The game’s cards feature authors and characters from classic literature featured on the tablet’s e-book reader. As the students consume these books, and demonstrate understanding in them, new cards become available for use in the game.

The game is turn-based, with each player placing cards into card slots in an attempt to outwit, outmaneuver and out-think the opposition. Cards are grouped into five themes – Journey, Love & Friendship, Mystery, Battle and Fall – deliberately chosen to transcend traditional genre categorisation, and engender a deeper curiosity in the cards themselves. Each card has unique actions which reflect the character or exploits of the card. Each turn, theme tokens are accumulated, which can then be used to activate these actions –  The more powerful the action, the greater the number of tokens required. Actions range from simple attacks, such as Alice’s ‘Flamingo Mallet’ inspired by her attempt to use the Flamingo as a croquet mallet in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, to Long John Silver’s Theme Token stealing ‘Pirate Raid’ and The Artful Dodger’s ‘Pick Pocket’ action which steals health from the opposing player.

The game includes a fully featured single player campaign mode, where the player goes head-to-head with the most famous authors and their character-creations, and an asynchronous multiplayer mode allowing students to battle each other with customised decks built from their own collected cards. As players compete, the game also writes a unique story based on how each duel played. By allowing players to craft their own narratives Story Cards aims to help inspire the next generation of novelists.

Story Cards has won the Serious Play 2014 silver medal and has been rolled out to a number of US schools as part of the Amplify pilot programme.