Co-creators Stephanie Bailey Troeller and Liza Cohn are two friends who came together to solve a problem:

How do you make learning geography engaging and fun?

The answer didn't come overnight. It took more than two years of brainstorming, designing, testing, and refining to bring the magic of geography to life—one continent at a time, beginning with Africa. Along the way, we conducted extensive playtesting in public middle and high schools throughout New Jersey and New York City, as well as with families, teens, and adults in their homes.

Stephanie and Liza spent one year brain storming, to create a whimsical deck of Country Cards. Stephanie, a professional cartoonist, created the unique Dad in Chad cartoon universe, where she drew each country’s shape and created an original cartoon around it. Then Stephanie and Liza added a rhyming title to help players easily recognize the country, its name, shape, and relative size as it appears on the map.  For example, the country Chad looks like the profile of a man, put a cartoon bow tie under Chad and “poof” you get “Dad in Chad.” 

The most frequently asked question we get about our board game is: “Why is your game called Dad in Chad?” The simple answer is because the country Chad looks like the profile of a man’s head, which inspired us to create an entire cartoon universe around our original cartoon character named Dad in Chad.

Dad in Chad is an immersive story-driven adventure, through the creation of the cartoon character named Dad. In the Adventure Card deck, Dad has adventures in all of Africa’s 54 countries. Players race across africa to help Dad return home. Here players learn real facts about the culture, nature, and sports in Africa today, Playing Dad in Chad! is an immersive experience. Dad brings you into his cartoon universe, where you: feel the heat of the Saharan sun while riding a camel across Mali, smile and wave at the paparazzi as you walk the red carpet in Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood) or get swept up in the power and grit of a rugby match in Zimbabwe.

During the game, players embark on an adventure across Africa where they move their pawn around the perimeter of the game board collecting countries and adventures to create a route for Dad to travel from South Africa back home to Chad. At the same time, a luxury cruise ship continually circumnavigates the continent as an agent of chaos, allowing players to sabotage their opponents’ efforts to create a route for Dad. By strategically swapping countries players compete to be the first to get Dad back home to Chad and have 3 adventures along the way. 

As you explore the continent of Africa through the Dad in Chad! cartoon universe, we hope your African travels ignite a spark magic in your life as it has with ours.