Dad in Chad!
- Board's Eye View
- May 12
- 3 min read
Updated: May 25
Designed by Stephanie Bailey Troeller and Liza Cohn, and illustrated by Stephanie Bailey Troeller, Dad in Chad! is a light family game where the 2-4 players are almost certain to leave the table much more knowledgable about the continent of Africa than they were before they started playing. The educational element is a healthy by-product of the game.
The object of the game is to be the first player to collect three matching pairs of country and adventure cards and to link them using travel cards to create a route to each, starting in South Africa and ending in Chad. The Dad in the game is the notional traveller and the game is designed around the fact that the cartoon of the Dad's head is the very shape of the country of Chad.
The game uses a simple roll & move mechanic. On your turn you roll a pair of standard six-sided dice; one is used to move a cruise ship along the ports around the continent and both are used to move your pawn around the track on the perimeter of the board. Where your pawn ends up determines the action you take; in most cases to pick up a country and/or an adventure card. If the cruise ship ends its move on one of the six ports with a ship illustration by it then you get to take a 'take that' action against another player, making them lose one of their coastal countries that hasn't yet been paired with a matching adventure card.
As you would expect in a roll & move game and with random card draws, there's inevitably a high luck factor in Dad in Chad! You might be lucky and draw an adventure card that can be paired with a country card you've previously drawn but on another occasion you might find it hard to even pick up adventure cards just because of where your pawn happens to land. This isn't then a game of deep strategy but it can nevertheless prove to be an exciting family game. Because you can draw from the top of the discard pile as an alternative to the draw deck, a player that gets to force a discard through the cruise ship may be able to profit from it directly and take that card if their pawn has landed on an appropriate spot.
Over the course of play, you will almost certainly learn more of the human geography of Africa and the location of each of the 54 countries that make up the continent, not least because the adventure cards are full of fun facts about specific countries. For the purpose of the game you're only looking out for a country name on an adventure card that matches a country card you've collected but you're sure to assimilate some of the additional factual info on the cards.
Collecting three matching pairs doesn't immediately give you the win; you still have to create a route from South Africa to Chad via those three countries. Players all start with a car, boat and plane card but you'll need more. Planes can be used to connect any two countries, so plane cards are far and away the most versatile. Boats can connect any coastal countries and/or islands. Cars are by far the least useful because they only connect countries that share a land border. There are spaces on the track that let you roll a die to pick up a travel card but you ony get a plane card if you roll a 6 after you land there.
In our plays of Dad in Chad! at Board's Eye View we came up with some simple 'house rule' variants to make players just a little less dependent on luck. One option would be to allow players to trade in one type of card for another on a 2-for-1 exchange rate (ie: discard two country cards to draw an adventure card). This adds more hand management to the game and a decision for players over which cards are best to hang onto and which they can more readily part with. We'd also suggest a modification to the travel card rules allowing car cards to be chained so you can play multiple car cards for land journeys crossing multiple borders. It's one of the strengths of Dad in Chad! that it lends itself so well to such simple tweaks.
Can we look forward to European and Asian equivalents? Mum in Mumbai perhaps, or Cousin in Kazakhstan... :-)
If you can't find Dad in Chad! at your local game store, click here to order it direct from the publisher.
