My mother loves games. While she couldn’t tell you what’s new or currently hot most days, not much makes her smile like a game night. You’ll find some evidence at the top of her coat closet, which has housed a rotating cast featuring the likes of Taboo, Scattergories, Jenga, Operation, Trouble, and more for years. If you need more proof, a peek through my childhood home’s windows in the late 2000s, early 2010s would reveal a family twisting and turning their bodies to get just the right bowling ball curve in Wii Sports (and later Wii Sports Resort), or match the faceless dancer cutting loose in the latest Just Dance. 

She’s not often a winner (unless it’s Spades), but the prospect of losing has never curbed her enthusiasm for play. As such, whenever it’s her turn to shine in the spotlight, whether it be a birthday, anniversary, personal achievement, or Mother’s Day, my family can expect an evening of playful yelling and incessant reiteration of agreed-upon rules above a messy array of game pieces. 

Having an increasingly spread-out family means that some traditions morph to survive the distance. While games like Scattergories are still relatively easy to play across a Zoom call, many other board games lose some of their fun over Wi-Fi. I also don’t know of any Wii remotes that can work across state lines. Fortunately, the time that allows kids to become adults and move away also lets games transform to meet modern needs. Few other collections of games have stepped up to fill my family’s needs like Jackbox Games. And no other game has left us gasping for air after each outrageous round as much as Survive the Internet from The Jackbox Party Pack 4.

Played on your phone, and needing only one copy of the 2017 game, Survive the Internet is a party game where people write anonymous answers to opinion-based prompts. Those answers then get sent to a random player who creates a response that twists the original meaning. The final combinations will act as social media captions and comments, news headlines and reactions, and more, aiming to get the biggest laughs or groans out of the room. Each round ends with players voting for their favorite answers, with points assigned to those who wrote them. In my experience, what this game usually devolves into is laughing at a digital billboard of old and newly created inside jokes, roasts that wouldn’t be funny if said by less loved ones, and outright nonsensical strings of letters and symbols shared only because the space is safe enough to blurt them out. 

Admittedly, I am the most responsible for this game’s continued appearance at my family’s game nights. As the family game sicko, the duty of finding a fun game that can be played together, regardless of physical proximity, has regularly fallen to me as I’ve gotten older. I often think about shaking things up with a new challenger, and sometimes do, but Survive the Internet is almost perfect for what the night is for. Despite throwing so many, a good game night can be tricky to achieve. A new game requires learning new rules, and people aren’t always in the mood for a lesson. Even if they are, valuable time can be lost explaining how to play something new before yawns and bedtimes inevitably take over the room. This doesn’t even account for when a game’s engaging parts take time to reveal themselves, which can often lead to nights brimming with potential but ending just short of being realized. People have work in the morning, after all. 

One of Survive the Internet’s strongest merits is that its fun becomes apparent quickly, even when you don’t understand the rules yet. Given that the goal is to essentially destroy or diminish a player’s original answer (fitting for a game satirizing the internet), a person could effectively walk in on a session and just break out into giggles from what they see. If this hypothetical person decided to join the fun, their first few answers may not beat out better-crafted combos, but it doesn’t exclude participants from the fun. Plus, a full run of the game takes around 20-25 minutes, so even an hour of game night provides multiple opportunities to learn the rules. The biggest knock against it is at least three players are needed, with the fun anecdotally increasing the closer you get to the maximum eight, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a game night of two.

There are other Jackbox Games that could be up your family’s alley. I’m sure Trivia Murder Party and Quiplash have dominated more than a few households already. But Survive the Internet’s utilization of the digital townsquare, at a time when even your oldest family members have likely engaged with social media, creates a frenzied energy that allows players of all ages to cut loose. Given how hard-working and busy mothers often are, or are forced to be, any game that lets them drop the weight of their role, imbue their silliness into a fake hashtag, and bask in the laughter of the people they love, is a game that I can heartily suggest for Mother’s Day.