This is a pretty solid pack. While I don’t play most of its games super often, they’re mostly quite good for “every so often” and Blather Round is probably my favorite individual Jackbox game period. I’d say it’s honestly worth it just for that one with the rest as a nice bonus.

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.

Champ’d Up

In this game, each player is given a different odd theme for a champion for them to design, such as “Champion of Being Late.” You will have time to draw your champion with a variety of colors and then name them. Next, you’ll be given just the name and picture of someone else’s champion and you must design a champion to go up against them. The challenge here is that you don’t know what the theme for their champion was, even though how well each champion fits that theme is what the rest of the players and audience will judge the victor by. As the game goes on, the game will swap in a new prompt for your same champions to be judged by, allowing you to swap out for a previous champion in a tag team. The production for this game is pretty great with amusing avatars, narration, and style for the whole game. The premise is quite fun and works pretty well. I also feel like the game’s timers are pretty fair and you’re given plenty of time to draw an interesting picture utilizing the color palette and different sized pens, which is something I can’t say for every Jackbox game unfortunately. We haven’t played this game a ton historically, but it always tends to be quite fun when we do.

Quiplash 3

I don’t have too much to say here. As one of the more basic voting-based games, it’s one my group of 3 isn’t crazy about, though it’s okay for a basic game idea. This version updates the prompt database further but doesn’t add too much to the game itself. The only particularly notable difference we found was the final round has each player input a list of 3 items in response to a prompt instead of just one. This 3rd iteration of Quiplash is likely a welcome addition if you’ve played the first two to the point you know all the possible prompts by heart, but we didn’t get much out of it.

Devils in the Details

This is a game about a family of devils attempting to accomplish some particular goal like preparing for a family vacation. You then work (mostly) together to accomplish various tasks on your device to prep for the wider goal, in a series of rounds. Each player has a different devil character with some having certain advantages and limitations, such as kids not being able to do grown-up tasks like driving. Many tasks require teamwork such as one player getting a list of ingredients needed from the pantry and another player having to grab those ingredients from the pantry based on their appearance or selecting from a long list. Others require following certain instructions for how to swipe and such on your device. Points are awarded for completed tasks, adding to your personal point bank as well as toward the family’s overall goal. There are also “selfish” tasks that don’t contribute toward the family goal, but provide you alone with a wealth of points while wasting time. The other players will be alerted when someone is being selfish and they can click to oppose the character and stop their selfish behavior. There are a lot of variations on tasks but after a few rounds, it’s determined whether the family was successful in getting enough group points to succeed. I wouldn’t play this game over and over, but we find it pretty fun on occasion. While we mostly play these games for fun and aren’t obsessed with winning, the selfish tasks are pretty funny when everyone starts yelling about stopping someone from being selfish.

Talking Points

Talking Points has each player giving an informational speech based on partially pre-generated prompts that the players fill out a detail for, like “My whole speech is a paid advertisement for ____” or “There’s no business like ____ business.” The player will be paired with an assistant from among the rest of the players who will be lining up slides and speech transitions using a selection of stock photos the game supplies while the presenter has to roll with the slides and give the best speech possible. In the meantime, the audience can slide their engagement up or down. This game can be very hit or miss. When it’s good, it’s pretty hilarious and reminds me a lot of Patently Stupid, which is a good thing. But admittedly, you can often just get so stumped trying to roll with the slides that it’s hard to come up with something particularly funny and are just doing a lot of “uhhh,” which is only so funny. The engagement meter, while nice that it’s different from other games, is a little wonky in that different audience members would consider different levels of engagement to be worth raising the meter especially high, despite it being the entire determinant of your score, making the scoring system pretty hard to feel justified with the score you get, good or bad. I wouldn’t consider this game top-notch, but it’s pretty good, especially on occasion.

Blather Round

This game is kind of like charades but instead with vague pre-generated terms that create goofy sentences rather than any silent acting and gesturing. After picking from a list your topic in the category of Person, Story (TV show, movie, novel, etc.), Place, or Thing, you have to use pre-generated sentence structures like “Is celebrated for ____” or “Eventually, there’s a ___” and you can fill the blank with a combination of provided words that hint at what your topic is while the other players try to guess it. For example, if you had Socrates, you might say “They’re his Ancient Concept person” and “They are celebrated for the Teaching.” It’s in some ways a simple game, but we just tend to find it really fun and addicting. This is easily my group’s go-to Jackbox game and even if this pack had no other games in it, it would probably still be our most-played party pack. The only real downside is that the points are incentivized kind of weirdly and the best way to get points is when you’re offering clues and the others guess your topic quickly. While this makes sense from a reward standpoint as it means you did a good job, since there’s no teams, other players weirdly have an incentive to not want to guess as quickly since while the one with the correct guess gets points too, the presenter gets a lot more points. We don’t actually have this problem since the fun of the game is just trying to get to the answer, but it does mean the scoring system is kind of awkward, especially in a group of 3. Our biggest issue really is just that we’ve played it so many times, we now see a lot of prompts we’ve already done before. Blather Round 2 when?!

All in all, this is a pretty strong pack. It’s a bit weird from my personal taste in that most of the games are ones I’m only really interested in playing occasionally (other than Quiplash 3, which we rarely care much for at all). But the fact Blather Round is such a solid game to return to over and over makes this a solid addition to anyone’s Jackbox collection.

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 8 ★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 9 ★★★★★

Jackbox Party Pack 10 ★★★★★