Review: Story Box – Create Your Own Fairytales jigsaw

I am always slightly in awe of my daughter’s new-found imagination. If sometimes a bit baffled by the long intricate tales she weaves featuring people, her toys and bits of plot nicked from CBeebies – there’s nothing like being able to create your own story

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But even if I can’t quite keep up with the intricate exploits of her various bears, I love to encourage this creative side, these flights of fancy before the world insists she sticks to what’s true.

So after picking up some story cards in Florida, I guessed that the Story Box: Create Your Own Fairytales puzzle would be a huge hit and give us both a helping hand to make up our own tales.

The central idea of our Story Box is pretty simple. The compact little box opens up to reveal a set of double-sided puzzle pieces, like a long thin jigsaw, which you can then join together to create your own strip of pictures.

Then, using the pictures as a starting point, you weave your own story around the images. The cards we bought in Florida feature (mostly) animals with a jungle theme, whereas this has a fairytale emphasis – with a few twists for added fun.

There’s a witch and a king, plus gnomes (or possibly elves) as well as a girl who could well be a princess. But there’s also a giant pink rabbit menacing the castle, a blue moped and a few rather unusual twists to throw in to the narrative.

Depending which way up you have them, the characters stay mostly the same but there seems to be enough overlap that you can shuffle and switch them any way you fancy.

Certainly we’ve had enough variation to give me plenty of ideas, even if there’s been a heavy helping of ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘they all lived happily ever after’. If not turned into a frog, obviously.

Doing it with a three-year-old is perfect for keeping me on my toes too. Having created a satisfying plot, complete with retribution and happy ending, she’ll quite often then refuse to have the story finish, grab another and insist I add an extra scene. 

And one or two favourite pieces are now cropping up in every version of the tale – who doesn’t love a giant menacing bunny, after all?

I’m not quite sure she’s worked out that there’s no one single story to be told for each set of pictures – for a preschooler, it’s entirely plausible to think there’s one way to read the pieces, which mummy knows but she doesn’t.

I’m hoping that as time goes on, she’ll start to get the idea that she can create her own stories for me too. [EDIT: We still own these several years on and she has definitely enjoyed making up her own tales]

Because, as well as being small enough to throw into a case or hand luggage, there are so many combinations – 40 possible pictures making a picture up to 8ft long. The price tag and great quality means the lovely illustrations have got a shelf life longer than a lot of her books and games too.

In the meantime, we’re having a lot of fun. And I’m enjoying upsetting a few fairytale norms by introducing good witches, princesses who refuse to hang around in their tower waiting for a prince to save them, and after one too hasty scan of a card, a dragon disguised as a wolf.

For some more of my favourite travel toys for toddlers, check out this post – or the themed lists in my Amazon store

Disclosure: We were sent Story Box for the purposes of review. All opinions and ludicrous rabbit-related plots are my own. This post contains affiliate links – any purchases you make are unaffected but I may receive a small commission

Images copyright MummyTravels/courtesy of the publisher

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