The team
Sofia
Creator & big sister of four
Dany
Co-founder & tech
What started as a way to keep them off iPads.
I'm the oldest of five. Most afternoons growing up, I was the one figuring out how to keep four smaller siblings off the iPad — and out of each other's hair.
The iPad usually won the first few minutes. But when it lost, it was always to a card game — something with real strategy, something that ended in laughter. Forty-five minutes that flew by because we were playing each other, not the screen.
I wanted that for kids today — with the healthy-habits messaging built right into the cards. So I designed Squirrel Squad. The first squirrels appeared on the back of a takeaway menu, in a quiet corner of a coffee shop. I tried every version on my own siblings, then on neighbors' kids. I worked with a pediatric neuropsychologist and a professional learning specialist to ground every rule in the latest research on holistic, play-based learning milestones.
What came out is a game I can use to keep my siblings (and now my niece) occupied — wild family card-game chaos on the surface, and underneath, four healthy habits — Nutrition, Exercise, Mind, and Learn — quietly drilled into every round without anyone feeling lectured.
Healthy choices feel like superpowers when a kid discovers them through play.
— Sofia
Creator & big sister of four
Co-founder & tech
Apps reward staring at screens. Books reward sitting still. Card games reward looking each other in the eye and laughing. That's the whole brief — fits in a backpack, costs a coffee, travels anywhere, and kids learn by playing, not by being told.
Junior Mode dials it back for the youngest. Solo + Travel adds depth for older kids — and works in the back seat or on the plane. Standard 2–5 player mode lands everyone in between. One deck, no one stuck watching.
Drawing a Grump is luck. Defeating a Grump is choice — which Squad card to play, when to spend an Action, whether to burn your Bonus ribbon now or save it. Five-year-olds catch this fast. So do their parents.
That's the gap between dinner and someone needing a bath, a tissue, or a fight broken up. Every round of Squirrel Squad fits inside it.
The real benchmark wasn't other card games. It was the iPad — what kids would actually choose given the option. Squirrel Squad had to beat that. We rewrote it until it did.
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