The Jackbox Party Pack 9 Review

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Header

Alongside all the yearly FIFA and Call of Duty games, Jackbox has become a staple of the autumnal release schedule. This year, The Jackbox Party Pack 9 brings another assortment of party games to sink yourself and your friends into.

Jackbox has really grown and evolved over the years, answering player requests and adapting to changing gaming habits. These days, there’s a bundle of accessibility and game options that really make remote play with a remote group of friends feel both smooth and natural, and there’s full EFIGS localisation for the first time, translating the game to different languages and adapting more of the regional humour along the way. Outside of the quirks of Discord screen sharing on a Mac – play in windowed mode for audio to share – the game worked great for our remote play session, everyone playing on their phone locally while viewing the shared screen.

Fibbage 4

As always, there’s at least one returning game, and this time around it’s Fibbage 4 that takes the spotlight. It’s a straightforward game, giving the group prompts and asking you to come up with a fake, but believable alternative answer, before then trying to parse the correct answer from the group’s fakery.

New for this edition, there’s now a video round that ask you a question from a clip of video – ours was from an old movie with arctic explorers discovering something in the ice, but what could it be? It was a little like the ‘What Happened Next’ round from A Question of Sport.

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Fibbage 4

Much trickier to get your head around is the final round where you have to come up with one answer that could plausibly apply to two prompts. The actual answers do not overlap, but your lies need to try to, which caused a little confusion in our party. Still, you’ll get the hang of it if you play more than once.

Solid and dependable, Fibbage 4 is the anchor to the party pack – Fibbage: Enough About You also returns as a player-led variant – though it’s not the most popular of the Jackbox regulars.

Roomerang

Now we get to something new and definitely very interesting. Roomerang is presented in a reality TV gameshow style, replete with eliminations, secret tactical voting and pandering to the rest of the group.

Before the game begins, you pick a name, choose or create a job, hobby or detail about yourself, and then select an avatar. Depending on the group, you can just be yourselves, or dive in with quirky roleplaying.

The game itself is split across five rounds, giving different prompts and combinations to get you to come up with funny answers. It starts with a shared prompt – asking what you did with your hairstyle to start the show. It then follows with round that combines your prompt with another player’s — how would you describe their dance style? Then there’s a anonymised quick round before building up to a finale where you plead your case for why you should win the whole show.

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Roomerang

Between each round, there’s the elimination phase, where you vote for who you want to kick out of the show. The loser gets to type a few words on the way out the door, though they shouldn’t worry too much — rather than being ejected from the game as a whole, they get to come back with a completely brand new identity and a fancy hat.

The quirk is that everyone starts with 5 points, which they can add to or lose through each vote given during a round and elimination. Each round’s winner will also earn a bonus, which could be immunity from elimination, the ability to swap points with another player, cancelling another player’s elimination vote, and more. Since the score is kept a secret from the group, swapping points is a real test of how much attention you’ve been paying to who’s winning and losing.

With its inventive format (albeit one that has a long run-time across five rounds) Roomerang is the real highlight of Jackbox Party Pack 9.

Junktopia

Bargain Hunt, but you’re a frog trying to flog bizarre junk for a wizard — that’s the very UK-centric way to describe Junktopia.

Across three rounds, you have to choose from bizarre curios, from creepy dolls and torture chairs to cute cow squishies and jewel-encrusted fish, and try to then come up with a name and a pair of backstory facts to convince the others of their worth and value. You have both generated prompts and the ability to write freeform, as well as the option to have a presentation mode so you can speak over your item as it’s revealed.

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Junktopia

If there’s enough players, the items are split into groups, and then the voting happens by getting you to vote for your favourite of different item pairings. The final round then has you name your collection, and there’s then one last vote.

There’s potential for plenty of humour here thanks to a whole bunch of bizarre items, and if you’re done early with your answers the main screen shows an array of quirky magical incantations and what they do, though the format is pretty plain compared to others in the package.

Nonsensory

The obligatory drawing game in this Jackbox is Nonsensory, though it mixes writing and drawing across its three rounds.

The core concept of this one is the most difficult to grasp on the first play. You’re given a prompt, but are then challenged to give an answer that conforms to a particular range. So if you have to give advice to a new parent, you’re then tasked with that advice having a 6/10 usefulness, with the rest of the group then having to score your answer on that scale with points awarded depending on how close they were able to get it.

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Nonsensory

It gets far quirkier and more difficult from there, with the second round jumping to drawing from a single prompt and the second blending two drawing prompts. How do you draw something that’s 70% more cathedral than cat? Or 60% more crying than farting? The blessing with this drawing game is that you do have an undo button.

It’s a tricky game to understand, some people will always struggle with drawing game, and it’s just as tricky to figure out and differentiate between a 5, 6 or 7 out of 10 answer, but points are handed out quite generously and you can double down by adding ‘confidence’ to an answer if you think you’re in the right range. It also helps that prompts are only ever shared between two people, so there’s plenty of variation to be had as you go through each round. Give Nonsensory a couple goes, and it can reveal some real gems of bizarre creativity.

Quixort

Finally we come to Quixort (‘quick sort’, get it?) — the trivia game in the bundle and a fun team game. Presented as a Tetris-like block-dropping game, you goal is to sort answers from lowest to highest, best to worst, or least to most depending on the category or question. Strongest super hero, US high school hierarchy, putting the Friends theme lyrics in the right order, these are the kinds of prompts you can expect.

Jackbox Party Pack 9 Quixort

Each round has the teams taking turns with different prompts, and within that, each player on a team takes turns to place an answer. It’s a game that really encourages communication and speculation, and the opposing team can chirp along and try to put people off. Personally, I found myself chatting and trying to help — there is an Endless mode that you can play solo or with everyone on the same team.

The first round is pretty straightforward to help ease you in, while the second adds some fake answers into the mix that you need to trash (how old is Squilliam Shakespear, for instance), and the final round reveals to you which answers you grouped correctly and lets you try to correct things.

If you’re playing with friends remotely, you need to be aware that this one is absolutely the most susceptible to lag, and try to compensate with some of the online game settings, or having the one local player be in control. It’s also the one time where I regretted not toggling the non-US centric prompts option in the settings, and I found the choice between a loose category and a full mystery option to be a bit redundant.

Summary
As an overall package, Jackbox Party Pack 9 is another hearty five-course meal of fun party games. Some games take a little time to grasp the concept or lack a certain pizazz, but there's the dependability of Fibbage 4, inventive format of Roomerang, and even the trivia game Quixort finds an interesting niche to tease your brain with. A good entry in the long-running series, but not quite an all-timer.
Good
  • Roomerang's reality TV format is a real highlight
  • Just the right amount of drawing and trivia (for me)
  • Great credits music!
  • Neat post-game stats to view
Bad
  • Some games are tricky to "get" before playing
  • Quixort's direct control isn't great for streamed play
8
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I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!