In Haiti, where I grew up, funerals are enormous. The whole town shows up. People travel from Port-au-Prince, from Miami, from Montreal. And they stand up, one after another, and say things about the person in the casket that they never once said across a kitchen table.
I used to think this was a Haitian thing. Then I spent twenty-five years working across fifteen countries, and I learned it is a human thing. Everywhere on earth, we are fluent in eulogy and tongue-tied at dinner.
Why? Because everyday life never builds the moment. Try telling your brother, on an ordinary Tuesday, what he actually means to you. The words feel too big for the room. He will check if you're sick. So we wait for an occasion big enough to carry the sentence — and the only occasions that big are weddings and funerals. Weddings come once. Funerals come too late.
The math is simple: the words exist, the timing is broken.
Nothing needs to be invented. Every family already owns the sentences. They are fully drafted, sitting in people's chests for decades, waiting for a stage. All that's missing is an occasion that arrives before the casket does.
So we built the occasion.
The Family Toast is a free game with one mechanic: draw a prompt, stand up, raise whatever is in your glass, and toast someone at the table for sixty seconds. The prompts do the heavy lifting — “Toast someone here the way you would at their wedding. Don't wait for the wedding.” The timer keeps it from becoming a speech. The turn structure makes it a game instead of a confession.
And the phone records. That part matters more than anything. When the night ends, your family walks away with audio of the things people usually save for funerals — said early, received in person, kept forever. Grandchildren will play those files.
One warning from experience: the first toast is awkward. The second one is less awkward. By the fourth, someone is crying and someone else is laughing, usually at the same time, and the recording catches all of it. That is not a malfunction. That is your family saying the eulogy while everyone is still here to hear it.