The Jackbox Party Pack

Pretty fun in person, awesome with a group, better on Twitch… if you have a decent audience.

Yeah, like those games could ever fit in
real-life boxes!

Originally released to Steam on November 26th, 2014, The Jackbox Party Pack by Jackbox Games, Inc. is the first in what is now a long and successful series of games, with the eighth Party Pack. While not all of them are purely multiplayer (at least in this one’s case), playing with friends is strongly encouraged and everyone can play any game by connecting to a match through the jackbox.tv website on their smartphone and entering the unique 4-letter code associated to the game started. And hey, everyone has a smartphone now. All else you need is some way to display the game’s screen to everyone, as that’s where the questions will pop up.

Due to this setup, you can also play through a streaming platform such as Twitch or Discord – a lot of these games are built with the possibility to play with up to 8 players and maybe even more (one game here allows up to 100 players!), so the larger the audience the more fun you can have. I already covered games of theirs previously, namely Drawful 2 and Quiplash, and I remember enjoying them. Well, all Party Packs include five games, and for this one, they are…

Despite the forced inclusion of the Hunger
Games in the phrasing, this is actually a
science-themed question.

-You Don’t Know Jack! 2015 (1-4 players): You can play through 50 episodes of questions on pop culture and general trivia, all delivered with irreverent comedy by the host, “Cookie” Masterson. That’s 10 rounds per episode, totaling over 500 (!!) questions with sub-genres and even some fun bonuses. The most complete game here, I like that you can play it on your own, as it means that by buying this Party Pack you don’t end up with a title you can do nothing with if you’re not multiplayer- or streaming-inclined. That said, the questions are always in the same order in every episode, so you can try to replay them while knowing the answers to get higher scores. A lot of questions are phrased using pop culture, which can be a lot of fun to listen to but if you don’t know the references, sometimes you might miss out on the possible answers. There’s even a handful of surprises, like the “wrong answer sponsor” mechanic where picking one precise wrong answer in one question of the episode awards more points than that question’s correct answer.

Time for everyone's favorite: Is the answer to this question
"Kangaroo", "Peanut", "Albert Einstein", or "Uranus"?

Props for the Christmas Story reference there.

-Drawful (3-8 players): Similar to Drawful 2 covered before, this is a game where you’re given a prompt, must illustrate it as well as possible by drawing on your smartphone touchscreen (which is trickier than it sounds!), and afterwards the other players must try to figure out what the prompt was. Funny answers abound.

-Word Spud (2-8 players): A game of portmanteaux. A player adds a word at the end of the first prompt, then gets points from all the other players who wrote the same thing; after which, what the first player wrote is the next prompt, and it’s the next player who must complete the word or expression, getting points from whoever answered the same thing; and so on.

....I highly doubt that. Which, unfortunately,
means it's plausible enough for this game.

-Lie Swatter (1-100 players; yes, you read that right): In the first two rounds, seven flies show up with different topics. Each one carries a statement that’s either true or a lie. Everyone takes their pick, then the actual answer is revealed. For the third round, a single topic is chosen with seven true-or-lie statements about it (ex. foods that are poisonous to dogs or not). As you’ll find out by playing this game, reality is frequently weirder than fiction.

-Fibbage XL (2-8 players): If you ever played Quiplash, this is a full game version of the Round 3 free-for-all. Everyone gets the same prompt, which has a real answer, and is asked to type an answer of their own. The result is 3 to 9 answers, and the more you trick your opponents away from the real answer by making them pick yours, the more points you get!

Okay, but what do I do if I don't know
what a tanga is?

A collection of very fun games, the only issue the first Jackbox Party Pack has is that, well, it’s the first one; the one most people with passing knowledge of this series are likely to have played. As a result, its novelty may have worn off a bit. That said, though, I appreciate the inclusion of two games that can be played in single-player, especially You Don’t Know Jack 2015, which feels like a full game all by itself and has hours and hours of content. That one alone (+ Lie Swatter) might not make the Pack worth buying if you don’t intend to play the other games (in multiplayer or while streaming), considering the asking price. But I do recommend it, especially with friends or through a stream, because the games are a ton of fun and are worth playing.

The Jackbox Party Pack is available on Steam for 24.99$ USD. (Currently half price during the Steam Summer Sale!)

I'll be taking the next week off in order to work on this year's anniversary review(s), which will be posted throughout July.