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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.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning.
Mentored by Rima
#8A3B12 Characters who teach
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
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Tam
Reads every call aloud, and gets braver each stop
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Rima
Ends every call on a rhyme, as lô tô singers do
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Riddla
Never names a thing — only riddles it, like a cantor
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Smorfia
Sees a picture in every number, as tombola players do
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Hiệu
Sings the hint before the card, the way bài chòi is sung
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Kelly
Gives every number a nickname, like a housie caller
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Beano
Marks with whatever is to hand — beans, bottle caps, buttons
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Cartella
Is a tombola card: three rows, five numbers each, every column its own decade
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Quina
Shouts the moment five in a line are marked, and checks the line twice
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
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.
Mentored by Rima — 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
- ✅ 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
