Academics
CrownTales
Full-depth draughts (checkers) for tweens — play a real board against a graded AI in 8x8 and 10x10, hunt the forced-capture shot, and learn the endgame. Every piece is one row from a crown.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Draughtsmith
#a6791f Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Bastian
The double-corner fortress: drawing a lost-looking game by holding the safe square
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Kingsley
Crowning: a man that reaches the far row becomes a king that moves both ways
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Leapford
The forced capture: a man captures by leaping over a neighbor
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Ordell
Orthogonal movement: how Turkish-draughts pieces step straight, not diagonally
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Prong
The fork: one move that threatens two pieces at once
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Regina
Opposition and tempo: winning the endgame by controlling who must move
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Skipjack
The multi-jump chain: capturing several pieces in one turn
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Slant
Diagonal movement: how an ordinary man steps one square diagonally
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Volant
The flying king: the long-range king of International 10x10 draughts
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Full-depth draughts (checkers) for tweens — play a real board against a graded AI in 8x8 and 10x10, hunt the forced-capture shot, and learn the endgame. Every piece is one row from a crown.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Draughtsmith — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How CrownTales handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
CrownTales 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
CrownTales 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
