There’s a particular sound a festival makes on day one. Tents going up, sound systems getting tested, volunteers comparing schedules, and underneath it all the low hum of a few thousand kids who have been waiting for this weekend since school let out.
We spent three days in that sound. Mysh set up at the London Children’s Festival from June 19 to 21, and by the time we packed down, more than 300 characters had been dreamed into existence by the kids who stopped at our table.
Here’s what those three days looked like.
Three hundred heroes, villains, and everything in between
Three hundred characters is a number we can put in a report. What it actually looked like was this: a kid deciding, in about four seconds, that their hero needed to be part dragon. A pair of siblings arguing productively about whether a sidekick should be brave or extremely cowardly (cowardly won, and it was the right call). A parent leaning over their kid’s shoulder and getting quietly pulled in, the way parents do.
Character creation is where Mysh starts, and it’s the fastest way we know to show a kid what the game actually is. You don’t get handed a hero. You build one. And the moment they realize there’s no wrong answer — that the game will take whatever they give it and run — something clicks. The ideas stop being careful.
Multiply that click by three hundred and you have our weekend.
The number we actually care about
Festivals are good at producing big front-of-house numbers. Foot traffic is easy. Attention for ninety seconds is easy. What’s hard — what every team at every booth is secretly measuring themselves against — is whether any of it survives the drive home.
More than 100 of the players we met in London went on to play Mysh at home.
That’s the stat we keep coming back to. It means the game wasn’t a festival novelty sandwiched between a face-painting station and a snack line. It followed them home. It got opened again on a laptop or a tablet in a living room, on a kid’s own time, with no booth and no staff and nobody handing them a headset. They just wanted to keep going.
An hour is a long time when you’re eight
The other number from London that stopped us: over 100 players ran story sessions of an hour or more.
If you’ve spent any time around this age group, you know how much that means. An hour of sustained, self-directed attention from a kid in the middle of summer, competing against every other thing a screen could be offering them, is not a small ask. Nobody sat through an hour of Mysh out of politeness.
They stayed because the story was theirs. Every turn was a decision they made, a direction they chose, a character they’d built showing up and doing something only they could have imagined. That’s the difference between being entertained for an hour and making something for an hour — and kids can feel the difference even when they can’t name it.
What we took home from London
Three days. Three hundred-plus characters. A hundred-plus families who kept playing after the tents came down, and a hundred-plus players who gave us an hour or more of the good stuffm the focused, inventive, arguing-about-sidekicks kind of attention.
We came to London to show kids what Mysh is. Mostly, they showed us. Thanks to the London Children’s Festival for having us, to every parent who let their kid take one more turn, and to three hundred brand-new characters now out there somewhere, waiting for their next story.