A Spanish Fork family of ten built a card game studio using AI to fill the roles of an illustration team, a software shop, and a marketing agency, creating employment for twin sons on the autism spectrum along the way.
Spanish Fork, Utah — July 3, 2026
When Brandon and Elena Camp's twin sons started their senior year of high school, they ran into the same wall a lot of young adults on the autism spectrum hit after graduation: nobody was hiring. Parker and Colby Camp applied for job after job with little success, and their parents watched the search wear on. So instead of waiting for the job market to catch up, the Camps built the boys a company.
That company, Gotta Play Games, launched its debut title, Skip the Salad, on July 2, out of the family's home in Spanish Fork. Brandon and Elena Camp founded the studio with their eight children, and the timeline is almost as notable as the product: in about four months, the family says it went from a kitchen-table card game to a manufactured product with native mobile apps, a web platform, original artwork, packaging, and a marketing campaign — the kind of buildout that has traditionally required an entire creative studio.
From Ancestry to a side hustle
Brandon Camp's day job is marketing at Storied (Provo), a family history startup, and he spent roughly a decade at Ancestry before that, joining not long after the company's founding in the late 1990s. Gaming was already a family habit — the Camps describe themselves as "a board game family," and Brandon had been experimenting with AI tools at work when the idea clicked. The family had been playing a homemade game adapted from a deck of face cards, in the tradition of Utah card-game maker Grandpa Beck, who built a business out of similar reinventions. Brandon thought the concept could be sharpened, and started prototyping a mobile version.
The side hustle became official in March, when the family launched Gotta Play Games with the explicit goal of giving Parker and Colby real work they could point to — testing, feedback, design input, and operations — as they continued to look for jobs.
Built by a family, accelerated by an AI "studio"
The AI involvement went well beyond a writing assistant. Brandon Camp described assembling a small roster of AI agents assigned to specific roles: one focused on rules design, another on usability, another on project management. He said he went back and forth with those agents to pressure-test the game's rules against a simple standard — can a new player learn it in two or three minutes, while still leaving enough strategy for experienced gamers to want to stay at the table.
Claude and Codex were used to help build the mobile app and web version, while ChatGPT and Gemini contributed to card and box artwork. The Camps also said AI tools helped them identify Utah organizations and outlets that might be interested in covering the product.
Even so, Brandon Camp was careful to draw a line between acceleration and authorship. "Much of the conversation around AI is about the jobs it might replace," he said. "For our family, AI made it possible to create work that didn't exist before. It helped us build a company we never could have built otherwise, and our hope is that it creates meaningful opportunities for our children for years to come."
Elena Camp, a co-founder and clinical mental health counselor, connected the project to her own training. "Going back to school and becoming a therapist taught me that the right environment can completely change what's possible for people," she said. "We wanted to build that kind of environment for our own family. If our games help other families spend more meaningful time together along the way, that's even better."
According to Drexel University's National Autism Indicators Report, only about 58% of young adults on the autism spectrum hold a paying job in their early twenties — a gap the Camps say motivated them to build an opportunity rather than wait for one.
The game: dodge, don't collect
Skip the Salad flips the usual trick-taking card game on its head: instead of trying to win hands, players try to avoid taking them. The deck swaps traditional suits for vegetables — broccoli, carrots, onions, and tomatoes stand in for clubs, diamonds, spades, and hearts, with a fifth suit, corn, added to accommodate up to eight players. Each rank carries its own character theme, from gardeners and peasants up through kings and queens, with the ace reimagined as an "assassin" card to avoid confusion with low-value ones.
The game runs six rounds by default, expandable to eleven, and each round changes its own objective — avoid all tricks in one round, avoid tomatoes in the next — forcing players to shift strategy as they go. A modular system the Camps call "extra toppings" lets players layer in additional rules, from passing cards to opponents to reversing the entire scoring objective, so the game can be tuned for a family with young kids or a group of more experienced players. Blank "house salad" cards are included both as replacements for lost or damaged cards and as an invitation for players to invent and share their own house rules.
The physical card game plays three to eight people, ages eight and up, in about 30 minutes, and retails for $19.99. A companion mobile app is free to download on the App Store and Google Play, with a $4.99 one-time unlock for the extra toppings and additional rounds. A web version is also available for players who want to try the game before buying a physical deck.
Where to find it
The Camps are introducing Skip the Salad to the community in person this summer, with booths at Provo Freedom Days (July 2–4) and Spanish Fork Fiesta Days (July 22–25). The game, mobile apps, and web version are all available now at gottaplay.games.
It's the first of several titles in the pipeline. The Camps are already developing two more card games, Fizzle and Fume and What the Scrap, at different stages of completion — one with finished card art, the other still being prototyped from cards a family member cut out of printed sheets. Whatever comes next, the family says the process will stay the same: AI in the workshop, and the Camps — kids included — at the table making the calls.
Learn more at gottaplay.games.
