A Jackbox Party Pack is a weird game to preview! My personal enjoyment of any given pack is predicated on my overall enjoyment of five separate, distinct games, any number of which might miss with me for any number of reasons. Without even looking at the games inside, I can tell you that what’s most likely to happen for me with Jackbox Party Pack 12 is what happens with all Jackbox games: a friend of mine will pick it up, and I’ll play one of the games in this pack some evening, and if I have a great time, I might get it myself. That’s been the pathway that has resulted in me personally owning a pretty eclectic mix of packs (2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 10) over the years. I don’t think I’m alone in that experience, but I also feel like it’s worked out okay for me: I’ve got a pretty robust collection of party games, most of which I really enjoy, and all of which are still there for me in the years when the regular Party Pack is a miss.
Unfortunately for 12, I’ve now played two of the games contained therein, and I’m currently feeling like this might be a miss for me. And while I don’t think it’s good practice to hedge my opinions, I also don’t think my experience should necessarily be taken as an indictment of the whole Party Pack. It very much could just be an indictment on playing Party Packs with groups of people you don’t know super well, while sober, within a preview session time limit, and while trying to take notes.
The first of the two games I played was called Debate and Switch. It pairs off players and assigns them sides in a debate about a ludicrous topic built from player suggestions and prompts. One side is pro, and other side is con. Each side is then given 30 seconds to argue their side, while the other players vote on which argument was more convincing and points are awarded accordingly.
And that’s…kind of it? There’s a follow-up debate where a single word in the original prompt is swapped out based again on player suggestions, and the two sides can swap if they want, but the essence of this game is just debating a nonsensical topic for 30 seconds with someone. My debate began as something like, “At age 18, everyone should be given a catchphrase,” and transformed into “At age 18, everyone should be given a pizza with toppings of their choice.” Those are perfectly fine, mildly amusing topics, but the issue is that the humor is almost entirely driven by whether or not you and your friends can do successful debate-themed stand-up comedy for 30 seconds, and care about arguing (or fake-arguing) with one another. Everyone has to be entertaining on their own merits. If they aren’t (and many, many people aren’t!), then you’re just some people making unconvincing, too-short arguments about meaningless topics. Debating, on its face, is only fun for the kind of people who enjoy debate. For me, who does not, this was a miss.
That’s fine. I don’t love every single existing Jackbox game. Who does! It would be silly if I did. The reason Party Packs include five whole games is so there’s something for everyone. I was a little more optimistic about Hyperface. In Hyperface, you’re given a situational prompt and have to use various art and image-warping tools to take a regular photo of a face and manipulate it to look like an appropriate reaction for the prompt you’re given.
This game was…fine. I made some silly messes of a dog face and what seemed to be an ancient statue. The statue was by far my favorite one to mess with—several of the other prompts were kind of over-the-top photos of humans, with the same sort of look as stock photos, which were less interesting. You could also take a selfie, which no one wanted to do. I was told there are famous paintings and other odd “faces” in the mix, which does delight me. But like Debate and Switch, it didn’t really feel like there was meaningful escalation here. You messed up a face, so did everyone else, you voted on the best ones. A couple of the messed-up faces made reappearances in later rounds. That was it. I was surprised at how quickly it was over!
I’ve been trying to work out in my head what it is about other Jackbox games that work for me that didn’t work here. Games like Tee K.O., Fibbage, Drawful, Trivia Murder Party, and of course, Quiplash, are classics. We bust them out routinely at large group gatherings, particularly ones where some of the attendees have less comfort with video games generally and would feel left out of something like Mario Kart. And there are others that are less well-known that are personal favorites: Job Job, Bomb Corp, Talking Points, and Split the Room come to mind.
I think if I had to summarize the difference between these two games and the ones I love most, it would be that the best Jackbox games are not as reliant on individuals being individually funny or entertaining. All the games, including Debate and Switch and Hyperface, provide prompts to help you out, sure. But every other game on that list does something to shake up your individual choices, either by raising the stakes or forcing others to collaborate with them. Talking Points lets another player choose what your slides look like, forcing players to improvise and often contributing humor of their own. Drawful, Fibbage, and Split the Room aren’t so much about making jokes as they are about getting inside other people’s heads, and the humor follows from that. Tee K.O. lets everyone contribute different pieces of a T-shirt design, mixes them up, and then has players choose which bits go together, which again spreads responsibility for the entertainment. I could go on.
I think that’s where both of these faltered for me, but I’m cognizant my preview experience may not have been ideal. I was playing with a group of mostly strangers, so we didn’t have an existing rapport that let us riff off one another. We also only played one round of each: the quintessential Jackbox experience is getting progressively more drunk (or sleepy-silly, as the case may be) throughout the evening until everyone and everything is funny. Perhaps if we had played another round, growing more comfortable with the rules and flow of the game, I’d feel differently. It’s also possible that we just happened to land on the two games in Party Pack 12 that didn’t hit for me personally, and I’ll adore at least one of the other three.
At the moment, I just don’t know about Jackbox Party Pack 12. For Jackbox heads who weren’t in Debate Club in high school, I’d maybe hang tight for some more information on the other three games.
