The Jackbox Party games have been around for a few years now, and each numbered edition has been a banger for parties, hangouts, sleepovers, and streams. The games don’t rest on their laurels either, each Party Pack has tried something new in addition to keeping something familiar, and in Party Pack 8, Jackbox Games Inc. has succeeded once again.
Overall, the package is great fun. There is a little something to tickle the fancy of most of your average Jackbox Party Pack players. As with previous reviews, I will be going over each game included in this pack individually.
Drawful Animate
Drawful returns to the Party Pack and adds the new ability for two-frame animation. Adding this new feature gives your images some life and gives the Drawful formula extra spunk, even if it isn’t a huge change. The game plays similarly to the older iterations; you’re given a hand of absurd captions and limited tools to draw them with. You’re able to add in your own prompts so that you can personalize the games or give them some more variety. Because of the added drawing time in creating the two-frame animation, this one may not hit as well for newcomers, but after a game or two to show them how it’s done, I bet you’ll have them on their phones asking for the room code. If they don’t want to play, they’ll still enjoy the cute centipede corgi used as the drawing timer. At least I thought he was cool.
The Wheel of Enormous Proportions
This pack reaches back into Jackbox’s bread and butter, trivia! The game has this Legends of the Hidden temple vibe with a giant ancient sundial that acts as your host. The player’s goal is to spin a wheel to earn points, each player gets a piece of the wheel, but players who do well on rapid-fire trivia will earn themselves larger slices, essentially giving them a better opportunity for the wheel to land on them at the end. The trivia portion is divided into three rounds, and the questions are mixed. Most of the questions use multiple answers, and you’ll encounter things like “what movies did a specific star appear in?” From here, you’re given a list of 12 answers to pick from. The person with the most correct answers wins the round and gets a chance to increase their odds on the wheel. This game was a lot of fun, and I had some matches where even after earning the most significant slice, the person with the smallest ended up winning the final spin and the whole game. There are great laughs to be had and lots of jump-up-off-the-couch moments of excitement to be seen.
Job Job
This is quite a fun addition to the Jackbox family and probably the stand-out title in this pack. Job Job has you pull from a pool of words to answer interview-style questions. Each player answers an opening “icebreaker” question using at least five words in their response. The words used in those responses form everyone’s word pool for the next rounds. Players must piece these words together to make the most coherent answer to the following job interview questions. Similar to other games like Quiplash, your host, a talking water cooler, will read off two answers, and they’ll go head to head with the players voting on which one they liked best. Because of the creative nature of trying to put an understandable or funny sentence together, the comedy here keeps flowing and is one of the best of the pack to keep everyone engaged.
The Poll Mine
The Poll Mine brings the ranking game back into the series after other games like Guesspoinage and Bracketeering. Players here are divided into two teams and play a game that feels a whole lot like Family Feud, except instead of pulling from a selection of random people, you’re trying to guess the correct ranking based on your player’s opinions. So, for example, you may get a question like “what’s your favorite pizza toppings” and be given a list of answers to choose. Everyone picks their top three; then the game will calculate the ranking. Your job now is to guess this ranking. They throw a curveball, though, as it’s not always, “which on is 1, 2, 3” but you may get asked which ones are 3, 4, 5, creating a much harder guess. If your team gets any of the spots correct, you earn a torch, the game’s life system. Get one wrong, and you end up losing one. Whoever has the most torches at the end, or whoever doesn’t lose all their torches, wins the game. I love the ambiance presented in this one. It’s got a fresh new art style not seen in any of the previous Party Packs, and gameplay-wise, it is great fun. If you or your friends enjoy games like Family Feud, this one is sure to be a hit.
Weapons Drawn
For the first time, The Party Pack includes a second drawing game. Unfortunately, this one is a bit more complicated and requires your players to focus a little more. I don’t recommend this one for a quick session of Jackbox, but instead, maybe as the final game in your series to wrap up the night. Up to eight players are guests at a party, with the kicker being that all in attendance want to murder. Everyone starts hand drawing two weapons based on a given prompt. Included in your drawing is a chosen letter from your name. The game uses this as your calling card, and that letter must appear somewhere in your weapon drawings. You may end up with prompts like “stick” or “big cannon” as your weapon design, and you’ll want to replicate something along those lines. After drawing, one weapon will be kept while the other is dropped at the crime scene. Everyone is then allowed to name a made-up accomplice. From here, everyone will see the names of the accomplices, and your job then is to match the name to the player that created them. Lights go out, and the player that was correctly matched is now dead. From here, the investigation begins. As a team, you work together to look at the weapon drawing and use that, and their calling card, to figure out who the murderer was. As I mentioned, this one has some setup, requires some thought, and needs your players to focus. It’s a neat concept but tough to wrap one’s mind around. This is the weakest party game of the bunch here, but the possibility of fun isn’t absent.
The Jackbox Party Pack 8 is a heck of a bundle and honestly one of the strongest they’ve had as a package; it is the most consistent pack Jackbox Games Inc. has created yet. There are hours of fun and hilarity to be had with Party Pack 8, and this game gives no reason why it can’t be in your library of games.
A PlayStation 5 code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
