Jackbox Games: Weird TV Fun
We stumbled across an unusual game platform on New Years Eve ... a set of Playstation question-and-answer games where players log in on their phones and actions are all pushed to the right phone at the right time. These were from the makers of the You Don't Know Jack party quiz game.
The game developers made it easy. A four-letter code is shown on the big screen, and you go to jackbox.tv on the phone to enter the code then add your player name and make all the moves. It was almost seamless. A few times a player got disconnected. Otherwise, it was a fun, reasonably social event.
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First we tried the host's favorite game of the batch: Trivia Murder Party. There was some minimal story about being trapped and having to answer questions to break free, and how only one player cold possibly survive the ordeal. The host had a perfect smooth creepy horror voice and puts the players through a series of grim challenges with morbid relish. The writing and voice acting was perfect for this kind of experience.
It's still a trivia game, but the tasks varied greatly. One involved picking a finger to cut off, while another had you memorizing the red squares on a 5x5 grid and tapping them into phone after a few seconds.
Failing often was expected. Soon there was just the one living player, as was foretold.
A look at the phone side of the game
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The next game was Guesspionage, where one player is given a prompt each round and they chose what percent of people they think do the thing in the prompt. Then the other players get to choose Much Lower, Lower, Higher, or Much Higher and points are allocated to match the various outcomes, as well as a bonus for the first player if their guess is within 5% (I think it was 5%) of the actual value.
This one had a snarky fake government character as the host. The character and voice were spot on, giving a fun and slightly campy adventure. Some of the numbers were arguable, sources unknown. We were not even sure what country or age group had been polled.
The final round this time was a 3x3 card of choices in a category and you get to pick the two that you think would have the highest percentage based on the question given. Then it shows everyone's icons popping up on the spaces they selected, then the numbers hit the screen. Points are given. There was enough variety to leep it moving.
Guesspionage was light, quick fun and there were plenty of laughs along the way.
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Of the Jackbox games that we tried, Earwax was the least interesting to us. One player gets a prompt, then the other players all pick two sound f/x they think will be funny (without hearing them), then the original player judges the funniest one. There were too many fart noises and only a few combinations really fit well. Then there were rounds where we thought the sounds we picked would work, but the actual sounds were not what we were picturing at all. There were other controls, where the judge can play the final selections on the big screen. But the other players weren't really sure why we were voting at all -- it didn't feel like our votes counted for anything other than to keep us busy.
One thing was interesting to me with this "judging" game: I am sick and tired of judging games like Cards Against Humanity. Half the time you have crap cards and nothing funny to choose from. In person, it gets on my nerves. But when some disembodied voice hands out the points, it's just "Meh." Whatever. Still pointless, but there are no awkward moments or explanations needed.
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For inquisitive minds, here is the basic history of Jackbox Games on Wikipedia.
I won a round or two of each of these games, without honestly knowing why. The fun was what mattered, not what was chosen or why.
While these are all basically party trivia or choose-and-be-judged activities, the phone format works surprisingly well. We looked at about ten other games from this series but they were of no interest to our group. It looks like they just released Party Pack 13 recently.
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