After taking a slight detour last year for a (deliberately) dirty-minded pack, Jackbox has returned to its usual form with The Jackbox Party Pack 11, and once again proves that sometimes you don’t need to think outside the box.
Now an annual tradition, the latest crop features five original new games, mostly across the usual cross-section of “genres.” If this is your first time hearing of the series, this multiplayer game is actually a motley group of party games played on the participants’ smartphones or tablets, where they cast votes, doodle, and so on, and see the outcome of their inputs resolved on the main screen.
This fundamental premise hasn’t changed much over the years, aside from this year’s addition of a minigame that utilizes your device’s microphone. Luckily, the new games offered are refreshingly different in theme, which is nice to see from a series that can recycle its best elements a smidge too often.
True to the franchise’s roots back in the late 90s, my vote for Jackbox Party Pack 11‘s most entertaining new addition is Legends of Trivia. This category could be seen as the unsung hero at the core of the Jackbox enterprise, with some novel twists on the form in most iterations. While the last two trivia games (Quixort and TimeJinx) took a more clinical approach, Legends of Trivia makes it dynamic again with a dash of RPG elements and teamwork.
“The Jackbox Party Pack 11’s writing is as punchy as ever, and trivia questions pull from a delightfully varied pool.”
Players’ avatars actually matter, as each of the predefined characters come with stats that have a minor effect on the team’s performance (and reflect traditional player classes in RPGs). Once the game is underway, players will run afoul of monsters, enter battle, and vote for the correct answers to do combat. Each player who answers correctly does damage to the enemy, or takes damage themselves if they’re incorrect. Do well and you’ll earn gold, which can be spent to revive yourself if you get knocked out, or (if/when you come across a shop) on items to heal or get hints.
Outside of battle, players also get to vote on the routes the party takes, which adds a dash of randomization and replayability. The trivia format gets shaken up periodically as well, with “double answer” rounds (where there are multiple correct answers among the options, and getting at least one right avoids harm) or a list round, where players need to type in answers to fill a list (for example, identifying all the signs of the Chinese Zodiac). The Riddle rounds can feel particularly diabolical.
As expected, The Jackbox Party Pack 11‘s writing is as punchy as ever, and trivia questions pull from a delightfully varied pool. Pop culture and geeky IPs are mentioned as much as world trivia, walking the line between nods to today’s zeitgeist and evergreen niche knowledge about animals, geography, or history. Teamwork, communication, and pooling knowledge with your friends are critical.
However, it can easily turn anticlimactic, as if your party doesn’t perform well enough after a couple rounds (namely, scoring high enough to fill a sword-shaped gauge), you’re shuffled off unceremoniously to the main menu.
Play Legends of Trivia as a team-building exercise, then chase it with a round of Suspectives to tear that team back down again. As the social deduction game of The Jackbox Party Pack 11, Suspectives casts the players as gumshoe detectives who must puzzle out who among them is guilty of a nefarious (and randomly assigned) crime.
Gameplay starts with answering personal survey questions, like “how do you take your coffee” or “do you have beef with the IRS.” Then, one of these responses is randomly used to name a player as a criminal, privately conveyed to that player on their device. Other survey responses are used to identify pieces of “evidence,” and players take turns questioning each other over them, with the audience tracking their suspicions on their devices.
The key, as a social deduction game, is to watch these exchanges and try to suss out which of your friends is hiding the crime pinned on them. This can go on for several rounds, unless players are ready to make their final accusations early… provided they haven’t been thrown off by a piece of randomly-inserted phony evidence.
“Doominate is both one of the most hilarious games in Jackbox Party Pack 11, if you assemble the right group of people, and also one of the most ‘overdone’ formats.”
Every pack has a game that can come across as too mechanically or thematically complicated, and Suspectives is the likely suspect for The Jackbox Party Pack 11. Its concept is clever, with anthropomorphic dogs as noir characters for player avatars, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it proves a little dense for first-time players, or if someone in the group doesn’t quite “get it” enough to contribute properly. But once it clicks, and you’re pointing fingers at friends and loved ones, it’s classic Jackbox fun.
And speaking of Jackbox fun, Doominate is the token “game that gets corrupted by dirty minds easily.” Anytime players can answer writing prompts, decorum is likely to fly out the window as fast as a round of Cards Against Humanity. The concept for The Jackbox Party Pack 11‘s writing game is simple: take a concept and ruin it by adding another clause. Players then vote for the player who best made a good thing bad, and more votes means more points for that player.
While the theme and presentation are new, the structure is evergreen and familiar; Doominate os both one of the most hilarious games in Jackbox Party Pack 11, if you assemble the right group of people, and also one of the most “overdone” formats. It’s a great format, but sometimes while you’re waiting for everyone to finish answering, it’s easy to stop and wonder, “haven’t I been playing this game for the last ten years?”
The latter two games in the collection trend toward the more divisive genres. Cookie Haus is this year’s drawing game, where players are “employees” at a catering company and must decorate cookies to match prompts provided by potential clients. It’s a bit more prompt-dependent than previous drawing games, and trends towards being one of the more obtuse doodlers in Jackbox‘s expanding library.
Again, despite the new trappings, this is another familiar drawing game at its core. Better artists (or those with a stylus and a tablet) will steal the show, but a scrappy submission from the least artistic person in the group can also score a huge underdog victory if they’re inspired by the right prompt. Sometimes the theme of a particular drawing game can be harder to get into, though, and there’s moreorless where Jackbox Party Pack 11‘s offering left me.
(At least in Tee K.O. you have the option to turn your answers into tangible, bespoke merchandise, unlike the culinary concoctions devised here.)
Last is the oddball Hear Say, from the rarely-seen school of sound-based Jackbox games. It follows in a very strange lineage, from the flat thud of Party Pack 2‘s Earwax to the oddly-quite-good Guitar Hero successor in Party Pack 10, Dodo Re Mi.
The concept is, again, simple: use your device to record sounds based on the prompts; those sounds will be performed for everyone on screen; and players vote for their favourite, with the winning sounds played over a random piece of stock footage for further absurdity. Between these rounds, players are given little minigames to play on their devices, using sound inputs to manipulate a soundwave in certain ways.
In execution, I’d say Hear Say lands somewhere between the other two music games in the series’ history. I do commend it for being a different sort of experience, not based on doodling, writing, or trivia recall. It’s also the sort of thing that can alienate some players, who have stage fright or a lack of creativity in this department, or be sabotaged by technical difficulties.
With the right group and setup, it could be a breakout from Jackbox Party Pack 11, and one of the most delightfully unhinged experiences. It also works really well online, when players can mute themselves to record in peace and get extra points for surprising everyone else during the presentations. But a bad tech setback, shyness, or disengagement can ruin a participant’s entire 15-20 minute experience.
As has been the trend for most of the series’ history, Jackbox Party Pack 11 supplements all of its minigames with a host of options to cater its unique input method to the players’ needs—like longer working times while streaming and other accessibility considerations. Audiences continue to have a way to influence the scoring as well, and overall these contributions feel more balanced than some of the last outings.
However, I once again find myself coming to the same conclusion I’ve reached on each game in this series since… well, the fifth or so.
Is The Jackbox Party Pack 11 a worthy and capable collection of new minigames? Yes! This is a more original blend of themes, genres, and gimmicks. Most of the offerings work best with a group of players who know each other’s sense of humour well enough to avoid any accidental offense, or how to push each other’s buttons in the more social aspects of gameplay. The writing and host voice acting is as good as ever, and it’s hard to imagine anyone’s face not hurting from smiling after a good game night playing it with friends.
With a system loaded with minigame collections, however, am I going to keep coming back to boot up The Jackbox Party Pack 11? It’s a solid offering in itself, and I could see replaying at least three of these games quite often. However the elephant in the room is still the inconvenience of having several different Jackbox titles, when I’m likely interested in only half of the minigames in each.
I’d be more likely to replay the games I like in this collection, and even give a fresh shot to the ones I was less enthused with, if it was easier to hop between them—say, through a central launcher. I hate to keep saying it every year, but the issue keeps rearing its head, reiterating itself. Each of these collections is worth it on their own, but consolidated under one “roof,” with the full library of a dozen party packs more easily accessible, Jackbox would be a truly can’t-miss social experience.
[UPDATE: There is actually relief in this department for PC Jackbox players, in the form of the free Jackbox Megapicker utility, which does exactly what I wished for. While I reviewed The Jackbox Party Pack 11 on PC, I’ve been invested in the series on Switch since Pack 3, and was unfortunately unaware of this (incredibly handy) utility—which I would love to see on consoles, if possible!]
As it is, The Jackbox Party Pack 11 is another solid offering: fresh content for longtime players and a great spot to hop aboard for newcomers, so long as you’re aware that individual mileage may vary per game (or even group of players).
