This is the lowest I've rated one of more recent Jackbox Party Packs to come out. One thing I do appreciate is that this pack relies a lot less on sequels and reiterations of earlier Jackbox games you've already played many times and instead is almost entirely new unique games, with the exception of Drawful: Animate which is still different and improved enough that it feels totally new. While I feel like this experimentation is part of the reason I don't like this pack as much, it is still cool to see as I think if every pack started to just be several sequels of a game we've seen 5 times, it'd get old fast.

Usual disclaimers: I'm writing this review after having played a lot of Jackbox already. I generally play over Discord stream with a group of 3 (including me). I've got less experience with games that require more people but have still played them. My rating will mostly be based on a holistic look at the pack based on individual impressions of the different games contained.

Poll Mine

This is a quirky game in which the players divide into two teams who will be going through a sort of "dungeon crawl" of encounters based on how well they can guess certain polling results. Each round will poll each of the players to pick their ordering for certain subjective listings such as "which of these is the best name for a dog." The placements will be averaged and then the teams will trade off trying to pick the correct doors in order, sometimes from first to last, last to first, or only picking #2-#5. Wrong answers can use up your torches (basically like your lives) as you encounter monsters, but right answers can gain torches. The goal is to survive the Poll Mine through to the end. This is a good example of the experimentation I'm glad they went for with this pack as this game is fairly different from a lot of other Jackbox games, despite having similar themes and methods for the emerging gameplay. I still don't like it a ton, but I at least have appreciated the novelty of it the times I've played it. The dungeon theme is also pretty cute.

The Wheel of Enormous Proportions

This is a weird game that is mostly a trivia game with a bunch of RNG layered on top of it. You all answer a series of trivia questions, most of them involving categories of things (ie, which of these 20 names are Peanuts characters, or name the 5 Great Lakes of North America) and your rewards are essentially better odds at being granted points when you periodically spin the wheel to see who gets points. Once someone reaches enough points, the game is over. I low-key kind of hate this game. I think it's partially that I tend to not like the types of trivia you're asked but also the frustration of being able to still lose pretty badly even if you've been doing well on the actual trivia side. I've played it a few times to give it a fair shake, but ultimately, I don't think this one is for me.

Drawful: Animate

This is one of the better games of the pack, probably my favorite, despite it being (sort of) an iteration of a game in a way earlier Jackbox pack. This one is, unsurprisingly, a lot like Drawful, with the main twist being that you have two frames to draw your picture on and you'll be able to see the other frame in a faint outline while you're drawing. The idea here is to draw something that looks kind of like an animation as it switches between the pictures. Otherwise, the concept is pretty similar to Drawful from Party Pack 1, you've got a prompt and the other players will each try to make up a description for your animation then each try to guess what your actual prompt was. There's a lot of quality of life improvement from the original with much better resolution and a generous enough time limit to make interesting pictures. While it's not my favorite Jackbox game, it's still pretty fun and compared to its rough predecessor, this is the definitive Drawful.

Weapons Drawn

This is the Jackbox game I've played the least, just one time in fact, due to its limitation that you have to have 4+ players and my group is almost always just 3 of us. Given my limited experience, I may have some of the details wrong, but the short of this game is that you as players are at a party and will be murdering each others' accomplices and working to figure out who killed who. You each make up names for your accomplices and if another player guesses who made up what name, they can murder them. When you murder someone, you leave a picture of the murder weapon you were assigned which must contain in some form a letter the game provides you, which is your calling card. If the other players can match the calling card to your other drawings (by recognizing the letter they have in common), they solve that murder. The game has several rounds of this and you get points for having your accomplices survive, murdering and eluding capture, and for solving murders. This is a game with pretty strong production value and a consistent and entertaining tone. While I'm a little annoyed I can't play it as often with my smaller group, it definitely seems fun for an occasional game that combines some of the general fun of drawing games with more problem-solving and and a point system that relies less on voting than a lot of others. While it might get old after a while, this to me was probably one of the stronger games of this pack and I hope to play it more some time.

Job Job

In this game, you each answer interview questions through typing a (preferably wordy) answer which will then get chopped up and provided to another player as individual words they can fit together to answer their own questions. Players will be answering some of the same prompts so their answers will be compared and voted on for who has the better answer to the question. Of course, part of the fun is coming up with a silly-sounding answer using the word salad you're given. Though admittedly, a lot of that is dependent on the words your friends have typed in during the earlier phase of the game. I think Job Job has some potential but personally, I never really find it all that amusing. Maybe it would be different getting lots of different random word combinations to choose from in a game with a larger group, but at least with our games, I felt like whoever's group of words you mostly got pretty much gave you something close to the best answer you could write. It's not a bad game, but a bit on the meh side to me.

Overall, the weirdest thing about this pack is that while I don't like it that much and it's one of my least played party packs, it's something I'd like to see more of in the sense that I really like how fresh and different all the games in it are. While most of the party packs to date have followed the same formula of having one sequel game and a bunch of others, this one for whatever reason tends to feel the most unique to me and I hope that's a trend they'll continue to implement in packs to come. That said, the games themselves I feel are mostly just okay. I'd like to try out Weapons Drawn a few more times to get a better feel for it, but other than that, Drawful: Animate is the only game in this pack I feel is all that worth returning to.

My other Jackbox reviews:

Jackbox Party Pack 1 ★★

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 9 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 10 ★★★★★