This weekend, my 10-year-old son set out to be a Kingdom Keeper at the Magic Kingdom using the self-guided quest in Birnbaum Guides 2013 Walt Disney World edition. We didn’t encounter any villains, but we did have fun with a new challenge in a favorite theme park.
For those not familiar with the term “Kingdom Keepers,” it comes from a popular series of books by the same name from author Ridley Pearson. The Kingdom Keepers are students who protect the theme park from Disney villains, known as Overtakers in the books.
In 2011, Disney Youth Education Series (YES) launched the first Kingdom Keepers Quest, a self-guided tour that Pearson helped design to create an immersive experience for the series’ fans at Magic Kingdom. Because that program also has educational components — such as building skills in problem solving, creativity, language arts, mathematics and critical thinking — it is offered to groups of students.
Fans who weren’t visiting the Magic Kingdom with their schools, though, were disappointed and had no such opportunity — until this year’s Birnbaum Guide was published. So, what can fans like my son expect from the individual self-guided quest?
“[The quests] are all me, so they’re the same feel,” Pearson told me recently. “I think that because of space limitations, they’re certainly truncated. “¦ They may be a little more difficult in YES, but those take 3 to 4 hours, and this one takes, maybe, an hour and a half.”
Don’t be fooled, though. Birnbaum’s Kingdom Keepers Quest is not simple — at least not for a fourth-grader and his mother. We didn’t have any difficulty finding the various locations in Magic Kingdom that the clues describe, but some of the codes and word play took multiple readings to decipher. This was especially true of the first quest in the set of five. Fortunately, you can solve the quests in any order and then put the clues together for the final answer, so we did skip the first one and save it for the end.
Embedded in each quest are passages from “Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark,” the first book in the series, which hint at some of the answers. And, if you have a smartphone and download an app, there are extra goodies you can unlock in the Magic Kingdom to help entertain and guide you through the quests. I don’t want to give those surprises away, but the ones we saw were pretty darn cool. Plus, smartphone users can tackle an additional Expert Challenge Quest.
Can’t get enough Kingdom Keepers? You’re in luck. Disney Youth Education Series currently is testing a new quest for school groups at Animal Kingdom that will launch soon. Individual fans will get their own Animal Kingdom quest in the 2014 Birnbaum Guides for Walt Disney World, which will be released this fall.
“I’m just finishing now a new [Birnbaum quest] for 2014 that is four pages of Magic Kingdom and four pages of Animal Kingdom,” Pearson told me. “I think we’ll build that out as the years go forward.”
In the meantime, fans can meet Pearson this week when he appears at Walt Disney World to sign copies of the latest book in the series, “Kingdom Keepers 6: Dark Passage,” which was released April 2. For details on these events and more about what’s in store in the next Kingdom Keepers books, please see my earlier blog post.
Is the Quest in the Birnbaum Kid’s Guide or the regular guide? Is there a book of ‘just’ the Kingdom Keepers Quest? Or is it contained in a regular guide. Thanks for clarifying!
KRISTIN: It is at the back of the 2013 edition of the “regular” Birnbaum Guide for Walt Disney World. It’s also listed on the cover of the guide.