Heartache Hero: the kindness game 💗

About this kindness game

Heartache Hero is a free social-emotional learning game for kids roughly ages 5 to 9. Each round gives you seven real situations — a new kid eating alone, a grandma telling the same story again, a friend saying "I'm fine" in the voice that means they aren't — and asks what you'd do. Every answer gets an honest response, including the near-misses, because "nice but not quite enough" is where most of us actually live.

There's no login, no score to chase, no ads, and nothing collected about your child. It works on a phone, a tablet, or a classroom smartboard.

Using it in a classroom

Teachers use this as a five-minute morning-meeting warm-up: project one scenario, let the class vote with thumbs, then reveal. Because the scenarios are drawn at random from a large bank, you can run it all year without repeating a round. More ideas and discussion questions live on the teachers & librarians page.

Where Heartache Hero comes from

The game is based on Lulu Lilly: Valentine's Day Heartache Hero, a chapter book about a girl who notices the person everybody else walks past — and then does something about it, usually with a plan that goes sideways first.