Set in a small college town in California, the novel follows the creation of a sustained imaginative game by a group of six children.

April Hall, the daughter of an up-and-coming film actress, is sent to live with her grandmother in an old apartment house in Berkeley, California.

Her grandmother arranges for her to meet neighbor children Melanie and Marshall Ross, and they bond over "imagining games" and a shared interest in archaeology.

In the shop's storage yard, the girls discover a replica of the famous bust of Nefertiti, leading them to create a sustained imaginary game about Ancient Egypt.

Gaming scholar Cathlena Martin demonstrated how Snyder's book preceded and laid the ground for the role-playing gameplay designs of Dungeons & Dragons (1974), in "involving a player’s immersion in world building, collaboration, and role playing.