Let’s be honest, Jackbox games have always been pretty naughty, if you’re playing with the right people, but Jackbox Games aren’t flirting with us anymore. Jackbox Naughty Pack is full frontal naughtiness, right down to the 69 pence or cents in the price tags.
This is a smaller collection than usual, with just three games included instead of five, but as everyone knows, it’s not about how how big the package is, but what you do with it. Jackbox Games has adapted two series staples with Dirty Drawful and Fakin’ It All Night Long, and come up with a brand new game, Let Me Finish, for the climax.
Dirty Drawful is, well, it’s Drawful but with dirtier suggestions than usual. Players are each given a prompt that they then need to try and draw on their phones, with each drawing then being shown to all players who try to come up with what the original prompt is. All those answers are then voted on by the group, who vote on which one they think was actually correct. Points happen, and everyone has a little giggle along the way from the blend of bad art and bad jokes.
But things are a bit naughtier now with opening prompts like “And God pisseth out the universe” and “Colon, I’m home!” which are… quite tricky concepts to get across with stick figures and wobbly lines. Sex, drugs and plenty more are going to appear in the full prompt list, and you’ll be very glad to hear that yes, there is an undo button this time.
Fakin’ It All Night Long is in the same vein, a filthier and slightly weirder version of the social deduction of Fakin’ It. Everyone gets a secret task, but one person gets a fake task and has to try to blend in with their response, with the category determining if you have to type out a response, raise a hand, a finger count – a ‘Finger Blast’ as it were – or respond with emoji in Emojinal Damage. Given how vague and multipurpose emoji can be, this one can lead to quite a lot of debate… Regardless of the category, you’re trying to read everyone else’s response, how quick they were to answer, how realistic they’re being, and between you deduce who it is that is the imposter for that round.
It’s safe to say that you’re going to want to play this with a very particular group of friends, given how adult the questioning and prompts can be through Naughty Pack, but there’s an interesting pacing needed through the modes. The modes should start off relatively restrained before getting filthier through the game mode, the team told us at Gamescom, and they shouldn’t be too deeply personal. There’s no straight up question over a person’s ‘body count’, but there might be something about if you’ve had sex in a bathroom, for example, or more about personal preferences in the bedroom. Additionally, there is a streaming mode, content filters that will ensure that it’s safer for public consumption.
All in all, the prompts that we saw in our hands on time at Gamescom were on the more tame end of the scale, but seeing the team playing the games at PAX West this weekend has shown off just how far the prompts can go – “From 1-5, with 5 being every time, how often do you come from head alone?” is pretty darned personal, if you ask me, while “Raise your hand if you would totes f*** a vampire” is in that playful nonsense category.
Onto the final game mode, Let Me Finish. This new game is a presentation style mode that gets filthy in a more abstract fashion. You’re given a picture, like a set of tools, and then get asked “Which of these tools likes a finger up the butt the best?” Or a stacked plate of nachos and the query “Where do these nachos snort cocaine into?” Complete nonsense, of course, like some of the best bizarre conversational tangents at the end of a long night out taken a few steps further. Two players are then thrown into a debate and can put their case forward using their phone to act as a laser pointer and temporary drawing tool, but other players are able to jump in and try to steal the question away as well.
Importantly for players around the world, Jackbox Naughty Pack is localised through French, Italian, German, Latin American Spanish and Castilian Spanish. That’s excellent news, but has been an interesting challenge for Jackbox Games and their established translation partners. There’s just so much slang that needs to be translated, with such a range of vulgarity that can go from playful to outright offensive. Striking the right balance there has led to a fair bit of back and forth, the team told us.
This is all a big experiment for Jackbox Games after a decade of releases in the main series, to see how much of an audience there is for this kind of thing. Bizarrely enough, as risqué as the topics might be, it feels like Jackbox is playing it safe with a smaller 3-game bundle, only one of which comes with a new title and theme. That’s potentially a bit disappointing, but if it’s successful, Jackbox could get a bit more adventurous with more naughty times in future.
