Bella Sara

There was a cootie-catcher sitting on the counter at my local bar gaming store. I picked it up and discovered that it was marketing. At a certain age, I would have lived for this:

http://www.bellasara.com/

It is, I kid you not, a collectible card game based around pretty horses. Target audience: girls, ages... hmm, let's say 5 - 10 years old?

So I bought a pack. (Hey, it was only $1.50.) Since I was the first person to buy a pack of these, I got a promo gift bag. The bag included:

- 2 generic Bella Sara stickers
- a print of someone who is, I assume, a teen model (there's a photocopied signature on it that looks something like "Ashey Gislie"; she has straight blond hair and intense brown eyes (intense enough that Photoshop was plainly involved)
- six extra horse cards (not bad, since these are only 5 cards to a pack!)
- and a color-changing pencil. My gift bag did not originally include a color-changing pencil (apparently the bags vary), but jadasc felt that I needed the pencil and gave it to me. It is fortunate that I still own a pencil sharpener for colored pencils, since I only use mechanical pencils these days.

I now have ten horse cards and an "energy" card. The horses each have pretty pictures and inspirational quotes. My horses are:

- Hercules ("Don't be afraid to ask for help.")
- Halloween ("I will keep you safe.")
- Grey ("If you really want it, it will come to you.")
- Ghost x2 ("Your beauty comes from within.")
- Starfighter ("Believe in your vision and make it true.")
- Moonlight ("Trust the moon and the stars. Then your dreams are coming through.")
- Saga x2 ("Join me and we will be happy together.")
- Rose ("Listen to your dreams. What they tell you is important.")

The "energy card" is "Riding Lesson". I have no idea what it's good for, and it doesn't come with a quote.

There are also rules for three games on a rules card included with the pack. One of them is basically Tarot/meditation despite being called a "game" -- it just involves drawing a random card and thinking about the message on it. The other two are relatively unimpressive -- Magic, this ain't -- but simple enough to be grasped by the target audience while still being complex enough to avoid boring grownups to tears in the first two minutes.

To my amusement, I note that there is also a subtle advantage for the younger player. The actual games revolve around swift pattern recognition of symbols in the upper right-hand side of the card. These symbols are purple, smaller than Mana magic symbols, and stand out poorly against the background. A properly obsessed player will quickly memorize that Rose has one moon while Grey has three and play appropriately while a grownup is still squinting across the table to try to figure out what shape that might be.

And... here's the catch. Not only is this a card game... it's the Sims. Every card in front of me has an activation code. Typing the codes online allows the horse to be activated in your stable. Once you activate your horses, you can feed them and clean their stables and brush them and play games with them -- not complex games, but still.

If Hidden City Games does its marketing correctly, Bella Sara should be a big hit among its target audience. Probably not in the location where I found it... after all, it really isn't the target audience of Your Move Games... but in the same sorts of places where Barbie and Bratz are sold.

And that's kind of neat.