A long, long time ago, when the earth was still young and seas were made of molten lava instead of water, Nanovor — silicon-based, nanoscopic life-forms — lived, thrived, battled and evolved. As the earth cooled, they went dormant and hibernated for millions of years in sands and other silica-rich deposits. When their environment was heated and jolted by electricity running though them, they awakened again to lived, battle, thrive and evolve unseen and unknown until discovered by Lucas Nelson, a freshman at Hanover High, while he was researching dust mites.

With his science teacher Dr. Robert Sapphire — fondly known as “Doc Zap” — who actually names the nanoscopic life-forms, Lucas creates the Nanoscope to observe and control the Nanovors. Along the way, they start The Lab Rats, a secret subset of the Science Club at Hanover High and a group in which kids evolve and battle their best Nanovors.

With kids, we can’t escape drama, and like any good Saturday morning cartoon, Nanovor has a plethora of heroes and villains. Doc Zap and Lucas are the good guys, and Lucas is joined by his best friends: Nathan Bopar, a star in the Drama Club (and a smart kid also in the Science Club), and Drew Ettleson, a female track star who’s no slouch in the brains department.

The villains of the story are Ben Arneson, a senior (of course) and wide receiver on the football team (of course) and his girlfriend, Dana Diamondback, the head of the cheerleading squad (of course) who’s smarter than she appears, and Dana’s father, Dr. Richard Diamondback, disgraced former head of research at Sandia Labs, a nanotech firm.

Wait ... how did a game end up as a Saturday morning cartoon? Well, Smith & Tinker’s Nanovor is an online game, a Web video, a comic book and an offline handheld game.

Sound complicated? It isn’t. It’s a richly woven game/cartoon/comic. Smith & Tinker in Seattle (think about it ... Wizard of Oz ... Emerald City) has a mission for Nanovor: to bring together today’s young techno-natives online and on the playground by offering the first connected play experience. Kids can play Nanovor on a portable handheld gaming device or online, making connected play possible anywhere at anytime. The Nanoscope is actually connected to another Nanoscope — not via Wi-Fi.

A short animated episode is released weekly on Friday mornings. The Hanover High Web site is a place for savvy gamers to check out the Science Club. Really! And the online game is free to download and play. A full set of parental controls are available, including restricted menu chat and the ability to set play times when kids can log in. The parental accounts also allow parents to choose who their kids can interact with and if they can buy or sell in the Nanovor marketplace.

Ah, yes. The game. Free to download and play, kids playing Nanovor collect Nanovors, beginning with three critters. When they are done with the tutorial, they will receive six more critters and the Energy Modules to evolve them. There are three factions of Nanovors and four families in each faction. So in the free game, kids receive three of each faction.

Each creature has different attributes and attacks, and it takes strategy to field a swarm or team of Nanovor in battle against a friend or in a four-team free for all. A player has 1,000 points to use to put his Nanovor in play. More evolved Nanovor take more points to put into play, so a swarm can consist of as many as five of these little critters.

Combat is simultaneous, and critters with higher speed attribute get to go first in each round. Once a critter is put into the playing field, players can mouse over their opponents to see their stats and adjust strategy for the next round.

Each Nanovor has Attacks and Pedigrees, which are the Nanovor’s powers and badges. Players win badges and NMP (Nanovor Master Points), which are used in leaderboards. A secret Elo system (named after its creator Arpad Elo and a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as Chess and Go) is used to calculate the relative strengths of players for the matchmaking system.

A “wave” of new Nanovors will be released every four months for $1.75. This will give players 12 new Nanovors, of which, 48 others can be evolved for a total of 60 different Nanovors.

The evolution game is a mastermind-like code-breaking game with three different colored Energy Modules; players get five tries. Luckily, Energy Modules are not used up on failures — only on successes. Sometimes, a prerequisite may be needed before a Nanovor can be evolved, and the game will let players know what it is.

Discovery is fun and has its rewards. The first player to discover a new Nanovor gets a Presidential Badge, and the next 99 players to evolve this Nanovor received that specific Nanovor’s Discovery Badge.

Trading feels like a game in and of itself. At trade initiation, you lay out your trade items and see what your partner has for trade. You make the first offer by putting in items you’d like to trade for items of his. At the same time, you can chat. He can accept or make changes until the trade is acceptable to both parties. The Marketplace is a secure place where Nanovor and Energy Modules can be bought and sold for Nanocash.

Made close to the size of a trading card, the Nanoscope ($49.99) has a TFT screen and is the sharpest screen I have seen in a handheld console outside of the PSP and Nintendo DS. One of the reasons my niece and nephew prefer to play on my PSP and DS is that their Leapster doesn’t look as good. The Nanoscope? The screen is sharp. Very sharp. With 128MB of flash memory and a USB connection, players can play two different minigames to earn “Jolts” with which to train their Nanovors. There are four Stat Jolts to earn, and these can be applied to any Nanovor. To ensure that players connect and keep their Nanoscope’s firmware up-to-date, players will get two more minigames when they first link up.

To battle offline, players download their swarms into their Nanoscopes, then join them to begin a battle. Once battle is initiated, they make their moves each round and join them again — much like laying out your cards — and battle is initiated. This is where it gets really cool. The Nanovors leap across the screens of the Nanoscopes — as many as four screens away if a free-for-all battle is initiated. There’s no need for paper and tokens to count points, like the online game does; the Nanoscope calculates them for you.

Kids will also be able to play single-player “training” games by purchasing game cartridges.

So we’ve talked about the story and the game. Like all good Saturday morning cartoons, there’s the merchandising, which begins at a very nice price point: $10. The Nanovor Starter Kit will be available at major retailers, such as Fry’s, Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Toys R’ Us. You can buy the game plus a collectible Nanovor plus a $10 Nanocash card; the game plus the comic book plus a $10 Nanocash card; or packages that will be exclusive to a retailer, including some special pricing and collectible figurines or various combinations of Energy Modules, Nanovor and Nanocash for in-game use.

The Nanoscope will be available in October for $49.99 — a price point that makes it easy for kids to request in advance and that gives parents time to safely gauge their children’s interest.

There will also be comic books, graphic novels and a Nanovor Field Guide for purchase. And in the future, who knows what else? T-shirts and collectible figurines perhaps.

This is a smart and intriguing comprehensive strategy for the rollout of this online game/cartoon series/handheld game: a tiered roll out, a proven game system (Nanovor is based on TCGs), elements of discovery and best of all, the sneaky way science facts are thrown at the kids. Watch the first episode of the animated Web cartoon. The messages are positive. The characters are iconic and show that science isn’t for nerds. Nanovor may be targeted at 7- to 12-year-old boys, but the first one to get HER hands on the slime and dig out the Nanovor in my press kit wasn’t my nephew as I’d expected but my very, very girly girl niece, who also thought the cartoons were great!