The Magical Tale

Review

Game Description

“Once upon a time in the magical land of Nirgendheim, hidden amongst the wonders of our world, lived Baron Theodore Puffington the Third. A majestic young dragon of just slightly over 300 years old. In a sad twist of fate, Baron Puffington’s tail has disappeared. An untamed dragon’s tale can release chaotic magic across all of Nirgendheim and hurt the folk of this realm.

To save Nirgendheim and recover his tail, Baron Puffington cast an ancient spell to find him a champion that can help discover where his tail now lays. A beautiful book appears on your doorstep, reading like a fairy tale and taking you on an enigmatic adventure guided by Baron Puffington himself.”

Personal Experience

I picked up The Magical Tale back when it was made available as a Christmas special back in 2021. It came wrapped in paper with a pleasant holiday card attached, so I decided to save it for the next Christmas. The perils of having such a perpetually large unplayed game shelf and an attention deficit means that I didn’t actually unwrap it until this past December. But I’m glad I finally did!

While the game itself isn’t holiday themed, it is a cute, clever and joyous game. The game is played out of a charmingly handmade storybook, with a wooden cover, and pages that have been hand-tied inside. The pages themselves are durably printed on a heavy, glossy stock. The puzzle components are kept in envelopes that are glued to the pages, held shut with paper tabs, and featuring little pull and peek tabs inside to provide hints and solutions. It is a completely offline experience, though a QR code is present on the inside cover to optionally add audio narration and a deeper hint system to the experience.

Playing through The Magical Tale was a welcome balm during an otherwise foreboding time. It took a little over ninety minutes to complete the story.

Narrative

Presented as children’s fairy tale, The Magical Tale is driven by its narrative. In The Magical Tale you are tasked with helping a young dragon named Theo recover his lost magical tail (giving the title a punny double meaning) and restore his magic. The story is written with the appropriate amount of twee whimsy for a fairy tale, with talking animals, enchanted curses, and names like “McThunder O’Shine”. The story also features wonderful illustrations from Mim Gibbs. It would be a great game to play through with younger players, though I, a middle-aged gamer, enjoyed it as well.

Puzzle Play

The story is divided into eight chapters, each of which features a puzzle that you need to solve to find the magical spell needed to continue. It’s a neat way to handle offline solving; there is a ‘spell index’ in the front, each spell is printed on a paper flap that you can open to see the effect of the spell. If the spell effect solves the problem presented by the puzzle, you may proceed.

Despite all solving to a 6-10 letter nonsense word, the puzzles themselves are distinct and varied, ranging in difficulty from Easy to Medium. Most of them were pretty smooth solves, though a few were on the finicky side. Small hiccups in an otherwise fun game.

One puzzle involves colors, specifically red and green, but comes with a a small, inset guide for colorblind puzzlers to ensure that there’s no issues with needing to distinguish between colors. It’s an example I’d like to see more games follow!

The hints printed on the page do a good job of nudging players along, though with only three hints per puzzle, they are big nudges. The website does have wider range of hints with smaller nudges for each puzzle, if that’s a concern.

Recommendation

I think The Magical Tale would be a great game to play, especially with a younger puzzler, to get a feel for Enigma Fellowship’s game style before trying one of their subscription games. With its completely offline gameplay, it’s also a great game to toss in a bag on a vacation trip.

It’s worth noting, that while the games are available on their website, Enigma Fellowship has been radio silent since 2022. Orsi and Anuj are wonderful people, I hope they’re well and that we’ll see more from them in the future. If anyone reading this orders a game, let me know how fulfillment goes and I’ll update this section.