AUGUST 7, 2024

by Keaira

<aside> 🔖 This is my contribution to Autocratik’s event happening during the month of August aimed to talk more about the hobby of table top roleplaying games.

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Confusing, that is what today’s prompt was for me. After discussing what it means with friends, I learned it could be connected to either horse racing or anything else that I dare to imagine under the term. So I did follow that path - and more about my horse racing setting for Pasión de las Pasiones some other time - and picked games that are created to be played with small kids and adjust their form to that.

First is Magical Kitties Save the Day! by Atlas Games, a game where you can become a magical kitty that is solving more or less magical problems of humans for them.

Boxed version of the game is beautiful and comes with colourful booklets, kitty shaped tokens and a poster-sized map. There is a solo adventure in form of a comic book that is teaching the rules in a quick way and you can, of course, draw your kitty on the character sheet. It is cute and it works for both small kids and adults who like cats. It also supports multiple settings in addition to the default city, like a Mars colony.

I had a pleasure of trying this game with my nephew and niece as their first encounter with role-playing games and we had a blast in two almost 2-hour sessions and very improvised adventure, inspired with the booklet hook. The 4-year-old girl was rather listening and drawing than actively participating in every scene, but her 6-year-old brother was fully immersed in saving the city from evil robot-building racoons. Especially the map, full of details proved to be popular.

I would like to mention another RPG aimed on smaller kids, that I have yet to try: Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd.

This game supports stories told cuddled on a couch where the kid can be an animal from magical forest, pirate on high seas, firefighter in a metropolis or a space, or even a regular, cowboy. Or anything else. The materials that you can print for the game include colouring book and the character sheet is just a piece of paper for drawing your character. The skills are also “picked” by drawing a picture of what the character is good at. Then you just assign dices (with different number of sides) to the skills and you are set.