Star Stable Online is a hugely popular adventure game where you care for horses, take on daily challenges, solve mysteries and explore a fantasy online world. Originally only available for PC and Mac, it's recently come to mobile devices. Star Stable Online is unusual not only because of the scale of its success but because it offers an online game experience tailored for youngsters.

The game is set on an enchanted island full of magical horses. Once you have chosen your (female-only) character and customised how you and your horse looks, you can ride, race, and care for your horse. You can pick from a wide range of horses, from beautiful real-life breeds to spectacular magical steeds, each with its own unique look and personality.

To progress you use the map to find quests and meet people. This leads you into daily training challenges where you follow various courses against the clock. Doing this rewards you with experience and currency. You can spend this money (along with currency you buy with real-world money and subscriptions) for clothes and gear in the various shops.

You steadily get to know how to groom, water, and feed your horse as well as meet the computer controlled and player-controlled characters. You can ride together with other players, chat and create Riding Clubs. The range of events available expand as you gain experience in the game. Along with the daily quests you can soon enter races and championships as well as weekly events like fashion shows, treasure hunts, and a Friday night discos.

The focus throughout is on community and interaction. By joining riding clubs you can plan trail rides, picnics and even horse parades. Part of this is chatting to other players:

• Say chat: Players near you see your message.
• Friend chat: Messages sent directly to friend on Star Stable.
• Global chat: Everyone near a Stable or a populated place can see what you say. Only subscribed players can access this.
• Group chat: Message people in your group.
• Club chat: Message people in your Riding Club.

The chat is moderated and bad words are filtered, although this isn't fool proof. Younger players can restrict private interactions to friends only and add other players to their Ignore list on the Friends tab. However you need to contact the game makers if you want to deactivate chat for your child.

The result is an approachable and ever changing online world in which to play. Alongside the game itself is an avid community with forums and websites. The official fiction that goes with the game, The Star Stable Story, is over 250,000 words long.