Of all the franchises in gaming that churn out a new installment every year, only one has managed to avoid growing somewhat stale: Jackbox. As proven by this year’s outing, The Jackbox Party Pack 10, there are still new tricks up this party game franchise’s sleeves to keep the party rolling.
For the uninitiated, each Jackbox pack provides a handful of new minigames for local or online multiplayer—but players don’t need proper controllers, just their phone or tablet. Games are launched on the host system, and each player logs into the Jackbox website’s in-browser app and uses a randomized room code to hop into their lobby. That actual gameplay on your device varies greatly from minigame to minigame, especially in The Jackbox Party Pack 10, and social interplay is as important to the experience as ever.
Notably, the roster of games this time around foregoes the “staple” minigames. Usually you can expect a new installment of either Drawful, Fibbage, Quiplash, or even the historical You Don’t Know Jack to show up with the new class of games, but not this time around. While those are Jackbox classics that helped launch the series, it’s nice to see the veterans take a break..
That being said, there is one returning “series” in The Jackbox Party Pack 10: Tee K.O. 2. Once again players will be tasked creating a series of doodles, and then slogans, which the game shuffles up and presents to the other players. The goal is to take these random prompts and create a T-shirt design, and then players vote for their favourites in a grand tournament.
This veteran from the third pack has been slightly updated with new drawing tools, like erasers (gasp!), fonts, and more colours, plus you can choose from tanks or hoodies instead. These decisions are sometimes used to help break ties, or might play into more creative players’ designs. It’s been long enough that it’s refreshing to see Tee K.O. return, especially with the series’ advances in drawing tools,
(And of course, the ability to actually purchase a physical shirt with your design returns, if you want to wear an inside joke in public.)
Jackbox Party Pack 10 breaks into its first original game with Timejinx, a trivia game with a bit of a twist. It builds cleverly upon last year’s Quixort, where players tried to place historical or pop cultural events into timelines. This time around, players primarily guess when a certain event happened—the game provides an event and a window of time (like the first time a robot killed a human, and 1960-2020), then players guess a year and receive points based on how close their guess was. It’s golf rules where you want a lower score.
This is shaken up by other stages where players are presented with statements from different eras and must choose the appropriate response. There are also opportunities for lower-ranked players to catch up, with hints sent privately to their device—which proved potent in my playtesting. (The game identifies the losing players and sends them hints for the next few questions, even if the leaderboard changes in the interim; when I suffered a devastating fall from first place in the first question of a new round, my friends soared past me with their hints. It was like the Blue Shell of Jackbox.)
Timejinx is probably the simplest minigame in Jackbox Party Pack 10, yet it also proved to be one of the most stimulating.
Jackbox Party Pack 10‘s writing game is FixyText, which also checks the “internet culture” box for this installment and wins the “most likely to be overrun with vulgarity” prize. Leaning into familiar foibles of group chats, FixyText presents players with regrettable texting scenarios, where the goal is to come up with the most over-the-top reply likely to drive the recipient away forever.
Making up an extreme response sounds simple enough, but as Tee K.O. 2 has given players an eraser, FixyText hath taketh away the backspace key. Everything you type remains, which can either derail an eloquent concept or heighten the insanity of your reply. Even worse, two players work on a single prompt at a time, allowing either competition or cooperation, depending on the scenario. Once a prompt is finished, an AI voice reads your horrific responses, and players vote on their favourite words to award points.
The concept is a little difficult to execute and incredibly prone to chaos for better or worse. However, it was at this point that I started to appreciate just how aesthetically diverse The Jackbox Party Pack 10 is—I love the minimalist faces of the avatars in FixyText, and its overall minimalist look.
The biggest surprise of The Jackbox Party Pack 10, however, may have been Dodo Re Mi. I admit I had low expectations going in after bouncing so hard off of Earwax‘s strange sonic experiments in the second pack that I’ve never gone back to it. Yet, this musical game quickly became one of the most addictive entries to the series yet.
In Dodo Re Mi, your device becomes an instrument, Rock Band-style. Your avatars are birds which must make musical tribute to a carnivorous plant that will devour them if not assuaged, so your party picks instruments and a track and plays for their lives like it’s The Devil Went Down To Georgia. A mandatory tutorial introduces the basics: tap your screen in time with the scrolling prompts like you’re strumming a Guitar Hero guitar to earn points, with more points depending on the length of your streak.
“Dodo Re Mi makes the experience simultaneously accessible and stimulating and easily one of the most replayable parts of The Jackbox Party Pack 10.”
The songs on offer are either public domain (“Flight of the Bumblebee”) or theme songs to Jackbox classics. There’s also a relative wealth of them, which can be unlocked by playing the game in certain conditions. There’s also a great variety of instruments (all recorded and created specifically for this minigame) and difficulty levels. Your friend who can still get 100% on “Through the Fire & Flames” can relive the halcyon days of 2009 by picking a harder set, while your uncoordinated friend can pluck along like it’s their first time playing the triangle in a grade school music class.
At first, it seemed a little intense for a Jackbox game, but miraculously, Dodo Re Mi makes the experience simultaneously accessible and stimulating and easily one of the most replayable parts of The Jackbox Party Pack 10. I didn’t think I’d ever see traditional unlockables in this series, but I welcome it now.
The arrangements lulled me into a false sense of security at first. The realization that we were playing a dubstep arrangement of “Flight of the Bumblebee” was a hilarious curveball that kept the series’ humour alive in a very unusual gameplay scenario.
After getting through a song, the final product is played back so you can see how everyone fared and hear the fruits of your labours. Like Tee K.O. 2, you can even keep the final result for posterity by downloading an MP3 of your killer new track.
Last up in The Jackbox Party Pack 10 is the hidden identity and roleplaying offering, Hypnotorious. The premise is familiar: players are given a secret identity (public figure, concept, item, etc) and must answer prompts accordingly. The goal is to identify which of your fellow players belong to the same category as you and identify who is the outlier.
More than the other offerings in The Jackbox Party Pack 10, Hypnotorious works better with bigger parties; it supports 4-8, but 5 is a more practical minimum. Otherwise, it’s a simple take on the usual secret identity shenanigans, where your party’s engagement with the randomized prompt and overall stamina will have a big impact on the final result.
Audience support and a suite of convenience options support The Jackbox Party Pack 10‘s backbone, but there isn’t exactly a lot of new ground broken in this department. The innovation comes from the games instead, with Dodo Re Mi proving there are still more gameplay design elements the developers can explore for years to come.
All told, I appreciate the diversity of The Jackbox Party Pack 10‘s offerings; there’s less repetition overall than other packs since the legacy games are absent this year, and these five titles offer a good cross-section of gameplay and style. I never expected Guitar Hero to see a revival as a cooperative experience on tablets, but here we are.
However, once again, I find myself lamenting the delivery system for these games. It’s unusual to ask for this, given recent trends in the industry, but I still wish there was a central Jackbox app, for which I could purchase a new pack of games each year (or even individual minigames a la carte). Again, there are some fun games I could see joining my friends’ rotation of go-to party games, but the tedium of hopping between separate titles to access minigames is only increasing with each passing year.
Nonetheless, The Jackbox Party Pack 10 is a worthy option whether you’ve been playing the series for years or are checking it out for the first time, thanks to a well-balanced and diversified batch of activities.
