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CallerTales
One old brass cage has been to every fair on Earth, and every ball is a year. Draw a ball and travel: lô tô at a Mekong fair, a cantor's riddles in Mexico, tombola in Naples, housie on a ship. Play one round the way each place calls it, then write your own calls.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
#8A3B12 Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
Ama and Tam travel with the cage; the callers they meet are the forms themselves, and the cards answer back.
Ama
Draws the balls and keeps the call book
Tam
Reads every call aloud, and gets braver each stop
Rima
Ends every call on a rhyme, as lô tô singers do
Riddla
Never names a thing — only riddles it, like a cantor
Smorfia
Sees a picture in every number, as tombola players do
Hiệu
Sings the hint before the card, the way bài chòi is sung
Kelly
Gives every number a nickname, like a housie caller
Beano
Marks with whatever is to hand — beans, bottle caps, buttons
Cartella
Is a tombola card: three rows, five numbers each, every column its own decade
Quina
Shouts the moment five in a line are marked, and checks the line twice
What's inside
Learning goal
One old brass cage has been to every fair on Earth, and every ball is a year. Draw a ball and travel: lô tô at a Mekong fair, a cantor's riddles in Mexico, tombola in Naples, housie on a ship. Play one round the way each place calls it, then write your own calls.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned kits × 25 questions = 400 questions per app, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Rima — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How CallerTales handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ No ads, no in-app purchases — you pay once
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ Parental controls + session limits + content filters built in
CallerTales runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
CallerTales is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch