Social media isn’t social anymore. I remember when it used to organise parties and meetup events. It was a way to catch up with what old friends were doing. Now is the age of AI slop, shit you don’t want to see, and random influencers shaking their arse in Dubai for some goddamn pistachio chocolate.

Let it be the age of bloggers again!

Just kidding. Personally, I think the time for that is done. It’s the age of Reddit, WhatsApp, and texting. Group chats are the best way to keep up with people you actually give a shit about. And I suppose if you don’t have their WhatsApp, they’re probably not close enough to you for you to give a single shit about their trip to Thailand anyway.

Now onto actually topical stuff for The Puzzle Shelf: games. And more importantly, social games like Jackbox. In a world of digital interconnectedness and profound loneliness, why is Jackbox still so important? The answer, I’m pretty sure, is actual, tangible social connectedness.

Jackbox is lite. It’s accessible. You don’t need a massive gaming rig or a 100-hour commitment to learn the rules. You just need your phone (ironically) and a room full of people, or a Discord call,vready to mess around. It takes the exact device that usually isolates us and turns it into a controller that connects us.

We are so profoundly burned out on the endless, algorithmic scroll that we are starving for structured ways to interact. We don’t want to sit in a room in silence, staring at our individual feeds anymore. We want a shared focal point. That’s why tabletop games, pub quizzes, and party video games are having such a massive moment. They force us to look up, banter, and actually engage with the human beings sitting right in front of us.

Watching how effortlessly these “lite” party games bring people together has sparked something in me. It has made me desperately want to create one of my own.

I want to build a Jackbox-style party game, but built around a sci-fi, economy-based system.

Imagine this: you and your mates are hanging out, using your phones to trade, backstab, form alliances, and manipulate a galactic market that’s playing out on the main TV screen. Think of the chaotic, friendship-ruining energy of Monopoly, mixed with the quick, accessible social deduction of a Jackbox game, all set against a backdrop of cutthroat deep-space capitalism.

You wouldn’t just be answering trivia or drawing silly pictures. You would be actively negotiating with the person sitting next to you. You’d be leveraging resources, making real-time, under-the-table deals, and feeling the absolute rush of a perfectly executed double-cross against your best mate.

That is the exact kind of feeling I want to capture. Because the antidote to phone addiction isn’t necessarily throwing our smartphones into the sea. Sometimes, the cure is just hijacking that technology to play a genuinely brilliant game together.

The era of the algorithmic feed might be rotting our brains, but the era of the group chat and the shared party game is just getting started. Let’s actually play together again.