Mathique
Zayne
the field agent
Eleven, a hands-on tinkerer who learns by trying it: taps the mechanism, climbs the gear, catches the falling crystal. First through the door, every time.
Year 6 · Ages 10–11
The Crystal Core
A quest across Numeria to restart the crystal that powers everything. Ratio, algebra and long division stand in the way.
The story
On the day of the Puzzle Knight Academy’s entrance trial, the Crystal Core, the ancient engine of logic that keeps the world of Numeria running, cracks. Numbers slide off signs, bridges forget their angles, clocks run backwards, and giggling creatures called Glitches pour out of the seams. Your child is chosen as the Shardbearer and travels the broken regions with Zayne and Aria, freeing corrupted Guardians and winning back a shard of the Core with every mission.
How it looks
Full-colour painterly fantasy, closer to a JRPG than a comic: crystal cities, airships and four Guardian trials. The theme is the teaching, because the one character offering instant answers is the one making everything worse.
Meet the cast
Zayne and Aria carry the story. Your child is the one who can actually do the maths, so the cast set up every clue and react to every answer, and the solving is left to them.
Aria
the strategist
Eleven, calm and methodical, the one who reads the inscription aloud and spots that the pattern repeats every third tile. She makes slow thinking look like a superpower.
Digit
the teacher
A brass clockwork owl in a tiny mortarboard, assigned to the recruits by the Academy. Precise, pedantic, secretly proud of them, and the one who works the examples through.
Luma
the crystal fox
A shape-shifting fox who chose your child at the trial and communicates only in bell-like chimes, which Digit translates into elaborate and suspiciously precise intelligence.
Kael
the rival
Eleven, brave, funny and chronically overconfident. He keeps taking the shortcut answers, they keep backfiring, and he keeps insisting it is fine.
Null
the mystery
A pale young magician in a tattered coat of crystal shards who arrives just after each disaster with the same offer: why struggle, when he can simply give you the answer? His answers work, briefly.
What your child practises in Year 6
The Crystal Core follows the national curriculum for England, in the order a Year 6 class meets it. Every strand below is covered by the story, and Parent HQ reports progress back in exactly these words:
- Number & place value
- Four operations
- Fractions, decimals & percentages
- Ratio & proportion
- Algebra
- Measurement
- Shape & angles
- Position & direction
- Statistics
139 story missions in all, plus four boss gates: mixed-review checkpoints that have to be passed before the story moves on, so a skill is proved rather than assumed.
Start with the assessment, not the story
The free start-of-year assessment comes first: twenty questions, two per topic, dressed as your child’s first mission in this world. It shows you which Year 6 strands are solid and which are not, before they spend a single evening on the wrong thing.
The other three worlds
- Year 3: The Great Pie Festival · Ages 7–8
- Year 4: The Soggy Biscuit Detective Agency · Ages 8–9
- Year 5: S.U.M.S. · Ages 9–10