My primary issue with this first of 9 (so far) Jackbox Party Packs is that I came to it after having played the rest and as much as I'd like to judge it in itself, it's hard not to apply a jaded standard, but I'll do my best. I'm planning to review each of the Party Packs and since these are essentially just packs of 4 or 5 smaller games I plan to mainly review each of those games separately to see how they add up to an overall rating. I'm looking forward to these reviews since, as comedic party games, these reviews are going to be quite a departure from my other game reviews. And I play a lot of Jackbox so I have plenty of opinions. I also tend to play on stream with a group of 3 and some of that will shape my thoughts on a lot of the games in the series.

The short of this one is that while it was probably pretty cool for its time, this is unsurprisingly the most skippable Party Pack just given that so much of it has been done better as Jackbox has improved with later releases, with a couple exceptions.

You Don't Know Jack 2015 (YDKJ) - The classic Jackbox experience, despite the fact none of the later Party Packs have bothered to release a sequel. YDKJ is a sort of gameshow setup game in which you and your fellow players can buzz in to answer a variety of trivia questions in hopes of earning the most points, while risking points for answering something wrong. There are a few different stages to the game with varying points and stakes but one key mechanic is "screwing" other players, a limited use ability you have to force another player to guess the answer to a tough question and, you hope, get it wrong so they lose points. This can be a fun way to try and make a comeback against someone further ahead. One of the last rounds is a quick flash round where there's a prompt like "Pokemon" and then a bunch of words will flash on the screen like "bulbasaur," "clefairy," "roomba." The first one to correctly click "yes" on one that fits the prompt gets the points. The problem with this is that it's a very fast-paced answer and if you're playing this over stream (the way I and, I believe, at least a lot, if not most, others are playing these), even a 1-2 second delay means others can't really compete with the host. This sadly makes YDKJ kind of broken for stream play. This is a shame as in a lot of ways this could be the best game in the Pack but considering I play Jackbox 90% of the time over streaming, I've barely played it enough to have much of an opinion on it.

Lie Swatter - Probably the second worst game in the pack, Lie Swatter astoundingly can be played with 1-100 players. This is because there's no interactive element to the game, you simply see a bunch of the extremely random statements of supposed facts, most of which sound suspicious but could be true like "There are more ants than all other insects combined on Earth" or "Christopher Walken was almost cast as Han Solo" and you have to guess if it's true or false with bonus points to whoever guessed it right the fastest. The facts are off the wall enough that it's unlikely you'll just know very many though in my experience between me and a couple friends, we each tended to know or have heard something about one or two. Points are tallied up and someone wins. It's pretty simple and it's neat it can be played with a ton of people (likely making it an okay game for streamers to play with chat, though the lag issue with YDKJ would likely make that similarly unworkable, if to a lesser extent). The biggest issue is that Jackbox is at its best when playing with player input and player interaction and there's just none of that here, the most amusing thing about it is just getting a chuckle at "wow, I can't believe that one is true."

Word Spud - This might be the worst Jackbox game I've played. In fact, I'd barely consider it a game. Tellingly, it's the only Jackbox game that I can think of that has no instructions because there really aren't rules. The game starts with a random word like "Bad" and then the first player can add onto it like "bad game" then the next player will get "game" and can type "gamer time" and it goes to the next player with "time" and so on. After each word, the other players can vote 'yes' or 'no' on your addition. Amazingly, no criteria are given for what you're even saying yes or no to, you just decide for yourself like "did you like what they put?" or "do they have too many points and I want to win this stupid game?" I'd barely call this one a game as it feels more like a lazy bit they threw together based on someone's High School Computer Science project.

Fibbage XL - Fibbage has become a series staple of Jackbox and for good reason, it fits the format really well and nails those principles I mentioned above: player input and interaction. You get a series of trivia questions, intentionally obscure to the point it's quite likely not a single member of your group already knows the answer of a single question in the average game. Your first job is to make up a lie that sounds like it could be the right answer. Then everyone has to choose the true answer, but they will have to guess between the right answer and everyone's lies. There's a good deal of hilarity possible with this kind of set up and it's not uncommon that the right answer really sounds like something that someone must've made up as a lie and once your group has some practice, the lies get even more convincing. Fibbage is pretty much always great and this is thus one of the better games in the pack, but admittedly, I don't really see any reason one might play this one over any of the more recent iterations that have only improved on the formula. It's also annoying that back in these early days you couldn't skip instructions so you have to listen to them every round.

Drawful - This game is a gem in this pack, especially as surprisingly, later Party Packs haven't released an exact sequel in all this time (Party Pack 8 has Drawful Animate which is similar but with a significant twist). Drawful is essentially Pictionary, but you draw the picture on your device in browser. The prompts can also be quite silly to add a little Jackbox flair and force you to struggle through trying to illustrate sometimes abstract and sometimes very literal and specific things. Next, somewhat similar to Fibbage, the other players first have to type in what prompt the picture appears to be portraying. After that, the players who didn't draw the picture have to guess between the real prompt and each other's typed-in prompts. This puts a really fun twist on the game. About the only issue I have with Drawful is that your drawing space is really low-res and your pencil lines are super thick, making it really hard to draw. Further there's no 'undo' button if you mess up some lines. Both of these do add some challenge to the drawing part, likely somewhat intentionally, but the thick lines especially make it hard to draw more detailed and interesting drawings. Later Jackbox games with drawing improved on this sort of thing.

While Jackbox is pretty much always good and this Pack is no exception, the main issue is really just that later Packs have done most of it so much better. The gems here are YDKJ, which I'd really only play if you're playing it live with people in the room, and Drawful which, while it has its problems, isn't exactly available in a better format in later Packs. As my scores are based on my personal enjoyment, I rated this one pretty low since most of the time I was wishing I were playing later, better Packs, but if it were my first Jackbox experience, it probably would've been much higher.

My other Jackbox reviews:

Jackbox Party Pack 2 ★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 3 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 4 ★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 5 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 6 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 7 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 8 ★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 9 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 10 ★★★★★