The whole fantasy sports industry has been reaching out to a younger audience for the past few years, but Sports Illustrated is going younger than most.

SI Digital has reached a two-year deal with old favorite gaming company Strat-O-Matic to design fantasy games for a teen and pre-teen audience under the SIKids.com umbrella. Specifically, the 12 new games will be targeting 8- to 15-year-olds.

“We’re going after something that speaks more directly to this audience,” SI Kids managing editor Bob Der told Sports Business Journal. “We look at this as the most passionate time in one’s sports fandom, and there’s a definite thirst we see for a better fantasy experience for this age group.”

The effort will start with a salary-cap baseball game that was supposed to be available by Wednesday but wasn’t as of that night. The site’s fantasy page says that football, basketball and hockey will also be available by the end of the year. In addition, SIKids.com appears ready to jump into the burgeoning areas of fantasy college football and college basketball.

The games will, of course, be free to play. According to the SBJ report, SIKids.com boasted 250,000 registered fantasy users in 2008, when STATS ran the games.