Review of Enchanted Blend, a story inside of a story
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What is Enchanted Blend?
Enchanted Blend is a bookmark game that you can use to imagine how the story that you’re telling could be different from what’s on the page. You open the book you’re reading to the page you stopped on or flip to a random page, then use the page numbers to determine what qualities a magical tea might have. You then imagine or talk about what impact that tea would have on the main character, villain, or general story if a character drank it! What would change? What new branch does this adventure go down?
There’s no dice rolling or game board, just a storytelling prompt, and I think that’s great. When I started playing TTRPGs with kiddo, it began with me asking him what would happen if we made different choices in a story or for a character. This game is a small mechanic that’s easy to understand and gets that creativity going, either for grown ups who like to wonder about the characters in their books or for littles who have tons of stories inside that can’t fit on a page.
Age target for Enchanted Blend is for all ages
Enchanted Blend is about taking a book that you already have an expanding the story or thinking about how it could change. This can all be done verbally with a kid who is using one of their normal storybooks, like our Daniel Tiger compendium! You just need to be able to read the page number and have a conversation.
It also works great for books for older kids and grown ups – I tried it out with The Cat Who Saved Books, which is about a boy, a girl, and a cat who uncover the magic behind reading, and this worked perfectly there too (and the part I flipped to… they really could have used the magical tea).
Character and setting in Enchanted Blend is based on your book
When using prompts from Enchanted Blend, you’re imagining how the magical tea that you’re brewing will impact the characters in the book, so all the characters and setting are already made, and you’re imaging how things in the story could change.
When I ran this with kiddo, I asked how he thought the centering and playful elements from the magic tea would help Daniel Tiger have fun at the sleepover he was going to and to imagine he was Daniel Tiger and act it out – we had a good discussion about having fun and getting excited but not getting TOO rowdy, and it got kiddo thinking of all kinds of different things that they could do besides what was in the book.
Overall thoughts on Enchanted Blend
I thought this was awesome – it’s really easy to understand, and it sparked some fun discussions with kiddo. We also coupled it with drinking some very tasty herbal tea along with the story we were telling about our book, and it was great. If you’re looking for a low pressure way to start getting your kids into storytelling or help them connect with and think about their books a bit more OR you want some prompts for thinking about characters and stories that YOU like, I recommend checking it out (totally not a library pun)!
Find a copy of Enchanted Blend
You can find a copy of Enchanted Blend on the Lucky Newt Games itchio!
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