After taking a year off to do other things last year and really try to find themselves, Jackbox Games is now newly revitalised and transformed with….. well, it’s Jackbox Party Pack 11. Yeah, it turns out they were pretty good already and probably just needed a bit of a break to recharge their creative batteries. Having gone hands on with the collection, Jackbox Party Pack 11 has put the smutty mags back under the mattress and is back to its usual self with five new games and a little bundle of new and experimental ideas.
It starts with Doominate, a game about ruining prompts – think “add butts to a movie title to make it worse” but expanded into a Jackbox game. There’s multiple rounds of back and forth, first with generated prompts, then player created prompts that are passed around, and finally with a reused answer which you then have to “fix”, though you can obviously double down on the joke, because this is a laughter and popularity contest.
Cookie Haus is another riff on the drawing game, though this time with differently shaped cookies as your canvas, and with layers of coloured icing and sprinkles as you paint. What’s nice is that you get a choice in this, so if you’ve got a prompt and idea to paint Batman, and you get a particularly pointy cookie, you’re off to a good start already, and the ability to rotate the cookies can also bring some more creative options. Of course, you can always go route one with line art and words, if you’re bad at art or bereft of funny ideas.
Doominate and Cookie Haus feel like good twists on the traditional Jackbox oeuvre, but from here it starts to get a bit special.
The standout new concept, though, comes in the form of Hear Say. Using the microphones on your devices, it’s all about using your voice and sounds that you make to illicit a laugh from your friends. It starts from the avatar selection screen, where you get to record a little sound for your character, and it’s already amusing to have everyone making little yips, bloops and growls, seeing the duck, cloud, black void and more animate on the TV screen. The game puts a healthy dose of post-processing on any sounds you make, adding reverb, pitch shift and more to make them a little bit abnormal, or even more abnormal than you intended.
That’s then immediately applied to the game itself, where each prompt has you recording sounds and uttering phrases directly into your phone, and at roughly the same time as everyone else. It can lead to an absolute cacophony of sound, or a bit of recognition between people with the same prompts, and befuddlement as you hear something out of context. Voice an unpopular opinion, or shout what you would before jumping into a pool, make the clickety clack of a keyboard, or the buzzer sound for a wrong answer in a gameshow.
Naturally, then it’s off to compare everyone’s answers and get people to vote on their favourites, while little mini-games ramp up the noise-making chaos by having sound and volume be the input that you’re all using, but by far and away this game’s best trick is then taking those sounds and applying them to little video clips. I’ve no idea how the game did it, but seeing “But he’s literally just a dog!” applied to a clip of a lawyer, before shifting to a dachsund in prison garb being locked away saying “Well, I’m off to bed” is just… well, it’s one heck of a coincidence. It’s just as amusing to see duck noises overlaid on a rave, or a buzzer sound for someone clicking on an unsubscribe button.
I get the feeling that Hear Say is going to be the in-person gem of this party pack, but Suspectives is definitely the most personal and intimate, best for a group of family or friends that know each other relatively well. Before the game starts, everyone is presented with a little seven question survey, six of which are multiple choice, while one has a text field.
As a crime is committed, you’re then tasked with figuring out who dunnit, using those survey answers and interrogation sessions between players to try and narrow down the person. That’s best when you might have a little clue about what your playing group might think about theme parks, what their irrational fears are, and personal interests. And it means that, as the interrogation cycles around and more clues are opened up, the criminal needs to be a bit weaselly, bend the truth and answers, where their deceit could potentially be revealed, and other people’s innocence could be confirmed.
Rounding things out is Legends of Trivia, twisting the traditional trivia game into a co-op RPG-like adventure, where you battle enemies, gather loot and go shopping with your gotten gains. You’re off on a gallant quest with turn-based battling, but instead of picking attacks and abilities, you’re answering trivia questions to determine whether you attack or not. It’s an interesting twist, not least because it is so cooperative, where previous Jackbox trivia games have split people up individually or pitted teams against one another. Because of that, there’s more chatter about what the answers might be, strategy over potentially splitting your votes when you’re unsure and more.
Jackbox Party Pack 11 is sure to be on many a friend group’s wishlists for later this year, and after going hands on with the collection, this could be a really special one. There’s good twists on familiar formats, the social deduction game has real potential for close-knit groups, but for me it’s all going to about yipping and making weird noises in Hear Say.
