Review Etrail 5/5 · Jul 28, 2023
One of the best Jackbox Party Packs there is
This is my 3rd review of the Jackbox Party Pack series and where it definitely feels like these packs hit their stride. This pack is probably one of the best overall and anyone asking for my recommendation of a first pack to try out will often hear about this one as a top contender. It features two of my favorite …
This is my 3rd review of the Jackbox Party Pack series and where it definitely feels like these packs hit their stride. This pack is probably one of the best overall and anyone asking for my recommendation of a first pack to try out will often hear about this one as a top contender. It features two of my favorite Jackbox games and the rest of the lineup is decent to good as well. One caveat is that one of the games in this pack (Fakin' It) is more difficult to play on stream, though not impossible, more details below.
Usual disclaimers: I'm writing this review after having played a lot of Jackbox already, which has left me a little jaded on earlier titles as they've improved a lot of things with iteration. I generally play over Discord stream with a group of 3 (including me). I'm skipping games that require more people for now if I've not had a chance to play them with a larger group otherwise, though this pack didn't have any such games. My rating will mostly be based on a holistic look at the pack based on individual impressions of the different games contained.
Quiplash 2
In my opinion this is probably the weakest of the pack, though it may have a bit more to do with the fact I play in a group of three 95% of the time. I didn't see a lot of difference between this version and Quiplash from the 2nd pack other than there is an option for generating your own prompts which can be used in your games and added to a pool for online play, as I understand it. The game has a decent concept, but as is often the problem with these voting games, in a group of 3, every round is determined by the one person voting.
Guesspionage
I don't think this game tops any lists for Jackbox but I've always found it pretty fun. In Guesspionage, you're given a prompt with a percentage answer for instance "What percentage of people can name the six adult Kardashian/Jenner children" and you have to guess a percentage that aligns with survey data. The other players then guess if the answer should be (much) higher or (much) lower and points are awarded based on how close you are and if the other players were correct as to the right answer being higher/lower. It lacks much in the way of user-generated content and other than the often quirky prompts, there's not quite as much hilarity, but I find it a pretty simple, fun game that's less dependent on how large your group is and is a good way to warm up for a night of Jackbox.
Fakin' It
This is a game that I never really got to play until recently. Somewhat unique among Jackbox games, Fakin' It requires you to do some nonverbal interaction that often requires playing in-person. Since we were over discord, we simulated this by turning on our webcams which, other than being kind of awkward, made the game almost completely playable. The only difficulty is some rounds you're suppose to point at other players and our faces were in different places on each others' screens so we'd have to say "I'm pointing at X" which could get unruly if you had a larger group, but the game worked fine otherwise. The concept of the game is that you are given prompts on your device like "hold up fingers for how many books you've read this year" and one player, the faker, is not given any prompt. The faker has to try and hold up a number without knowing the prompt that will fly under the radar when in the next step, the players vote on who's the faker. There are other variations on this the game uses like "point at the player who X" or "raise your hand if Y" or "make a face you would make if Z," but it's mostly the same idea. We found this game actually really fun, even though we were kind of bad at it. While we didn't mind it, the game does have a lot of rounds and can take quite a while, which I suppose is a plus or a minus depending on your preference. I also imagine a large group could be unruly, especially in-person if you're trying to read the facial expressions one in a very limited time. This is probably why the game is limited to up to 6 players.
T.K.O.
This is one of the goofiest and most fun Jackbox games I've played. It's definitely better with a larger group, but it's still one we play from time to time even when we don't have a larger group. The game thematically is a tournament of T-shirt designs. Each round, every player draws on their device a few pictures and then generates several slogans that could go on a t-shirt. Then everyone will get a random set of each others' pictures and a random set of each others' slogans and will have to combine them to make something clever (or more often, something so stupid it's funny). Everyone then votes on a series of tournament bracket match-ups between 2 shirts until one is declared the victor of that round. At the end of the game, the victors of each of the rounds face off to declare a grand champion. One issue with playing with only 3 people is that you will get slogans and designs from the same person and people often make a slogan that matches a shirt they just made which makes the whole matching part a little less fun when it feels like you're just doing the obvious match rather than something ridiculous. Still, the game is a lot of goofy fun and even offers to let you order on demand real shirts with your designs on them, a feature that is cute but I will never use with the messed-up shit my friends draw!
Trivia Murder Party
This is another of the best Jackbox games out there. The concept is that you've been trapped in a murder hotel by a serial killer who is going to put you through a series of multiple-choice trivia questions. Everyone who misses one then has to play a short mini-game, which is often pretty unfair and involves some RNG. If you lose in some way, you die. If you die, you become a ghost, who can still get points and ultimately win, but will have a disadvantage later. In many of the death minigames, ghosts get to make the game harder on the living players. Probably the worst mini-game to get is fingers which just cuts off one of your fingers rather than killing you, which translates to being unable to pick the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th choice in the questions for the rest of the game, which is salt-inducing when you do know the answer but it's a finger you lost. At the end of the game, you all have to try and escape by answering a series of categorical questions like "which of these are species of fish: lionfish, basenji, clownfish" and you move closer to the exit based on how many you correctly select or don't. Whoever has the most points from the first part of the game starts closest to the exit, but ghosts get to choose between 3 answers while the living people only get two. Overall, the game has a lot of charm and while Jackbox games often have surprisingly pretty clever writing even in the narration, the over-the-top quirky serial killer persona is top-notch in this game and makes it pretty funny even though the game centers on otherwise basic trivia questions. I will also note that the trivia is fair. Fibbage by comparison is designed such that no one should know the answer, but while the questions in this game are challenging, they're much more feasible. The only real "downside" to this one is that Pack 6 does have a Trivia Murder Party 2 that is very similar but makes some improvements (for instance, cutting the fingers game, pun intended) to make this one kind of obsolete.
Overall, this is not a bad pack to grab as one of your first. In fact, it has some of the first Jackbox games I ever played and I've been hooked since. This is also the earliest pack that I still regularly play even having access to the full library to date.
My other Jackbox reviews:
Jackbox Party Pack 4 ★★★★
Jackbox Party Pack 5 ★★★★★
Jackbox Party Pack 6 ★★★★★
Jackbox Party Pack 7 ★★★★★
Jackbox Party Pack 9 ★★★★★
Jackbox Party Pack 10 ★★★★★
