Chores · Games · One family account
Same house, same week, barely the same conversation. Family Xchange is built to close that gap. One half keeps the house running without anyone being asked twice. The other gets everybody round a table — laughing first, and then asking the questions nobody ever finds the right moment for.
What Family Xchange is
A family needs two things to work, and only one of them is practical. The first is that everyone knows what they are meant to be doing and gets on with it. The second never makes it onto a list: knowing each other well enough to laugh together, and to say the difficult thing early, while it is still small. Family Xchange is built for both halves, under one account, and they are designed to feed each other.
01 · In the house
Routines and responsibilities that run themselves. Each child gets an age-appropriate checklist they can follow without being prompted, chores carry points, points buy rewards you choose, and you can see the lot from your phone without standing over anybody.
02 · Round the table
A proper illustrated board game that uses an app as its brain. Roll, move, land on a challenge — and a character asks that player something pitched at their age. Silly at five, searching at fifteen. Everyone plays the same game at the same table.
Where the two halves meet
This is the part that makes Family Xchange one product rather than two apps sharing a login. A child who clears their whole list for the day is offered a single fun challenge — the same kind of silly, do-something card the board game uses. Pass four of them and they bank a power play: a card they can spend at the next family game night, in front of everybody.
One challenge a day, so four passes take at least four days. That is deliberate. The reward is slow enough to feel earned, and it arrives at the table rather than on a screen — which is exactly where a seven-year-old wants it to arrive. Chores stops being the boring half.
In development · not in the app yet
Why we built it
Responsibility is learned, and it is learned by doing the same small things in the same order until they stop being a negotiation. The checklist does the reminding, so you can stop being the alarm clock, the referee and the nag all before eight in the morning.
Families share a roof and assume that counts as knowing each other. It does not. The cards ask the small, specific, slightly ridiculous questions that never come up over dinner — and the answers are regularly a surprise, from the ten-year-old and the grandparent alike.
Phones, bodies, money, consent, feeling left out. These go badly when the first conversation is also the urgent one. A board game lets them start years earlier, in two-minute pieces, with everybody laughing a moment before and a moment after.
Designed with a preschool principal
The challenges and the board games were developed with Hannelie Orsmond, a school principal and teacher with more than twelve years in preschool development. That is why they feel like pure fun while doing real work underneath: every card is matched to what a child that age is expected to manage, so little ones build towards arriving at school ready, and school-going children keep pace with their class. Learning through play, without a worksheet in sight.
Every card in the most sensitive tier is reviewed before it ships by a specialist in that topic — our panel includes a psychiatrist, an occupational therapist, a children's physiotherapist, a teacher and a chartered accountant.
Common questions
One account, two halves. Your family, your children and their ages are set up once and both halves use them — which is how the game knows to give a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old different cards on the same square. You can use either half on its own, and plenty of families will.
Chores is free to start with no time limit; Premium unlocks unlimited chores, parent tracking, challenges, goal-setting and reporting at R59.99 a month or R499.99 a year for the whole family. The game has a two-week trial of everything, and a free tier of ten challenges that keeps working for as long as you want it to.
No. A subscription includes the virtual board and a board you print at home — nine A4 pages, an afternoon with scissors and glue, and you are playing on the kitchen table tonight. The printed board is a nicer object, not the way in. If you want one, you can buy one.
It is the opposite shape. One device serves the whole table instead of one each, there is nothing to scroll and nothing to win on the screen, and the app's entire job is to deal a card and get out of the way. The children are looking at each other, which is the point.
Your child's data is never sold and never shared with third parties, and you stay in control of your family's information. Nothing said during a Big Conversation card is ever recorded by the app.
Calmer mornings, or a table with everyone at it. Most families end up wanting both.