The mad geniuses at Jackbox Games have a whole new batch of games to offer us. Fun, silly, stressful, and just plain crazy. Is The Jackbox Party Pack 3 worth your hard earned cash? Or are we getting tired of party games?
The Jackbox Party Pack 3 offers up some of the best games yet. There are some amazing standouts and some that don’t work out as well. Games like Tee K.O. and Triva Murder Party standout as early favorites while games like Fakin’ It and Guesspionage take a little while to be enjoyable.
Returning in this pack is Quiplash 2, a sequel to the “say-anything” game. There are some new questions and revamped features that make Quiplash 2 feel new enough to replay it again and again. One of the biggest additions is that players can now make their own episodes. You can create all the prompts and then are given a code to share out to the world. It is a bit time consuming but completely worth it to see the looks on your friends faces when they see a custom game. Quiplash 2 also revamps “The Last Lash” by adding new questions types and overhauling the final scoring system. In the first game players were given three votes for their answers, now Quiplash 2 gives players medals to award (gold, silver, bronze) then it converts the medals into points.
Next up is Trivia Murder Party. This is my favorite game from The Jackbox Party Pack 3 and (in my opinion) the best game Jackbox Games has put out. Imagine You Don’t Know Jack with a sinister twist. A serial killer has captured you and your friends and is hosting a trivia night. Get the questions right, win some cash and a chance to escape. Get the questions wrong, fight for your life on The Killing Floor. If you don’t do well on The Killing Floor, you die. When there’s one player left standing the game enters a final set of trivia where the sole survivor attempts to escape and all the other players attempt to have their ghost take over his body so they can escape. The Killing Floor mini-games are both fun and stressful. It’s a great new twist on your standard trivia game that is masked in dark humor.
Guesspionage is an interesting one. One player will get asked a question based on data Jackbox Games acquired. Usually it’s a “What percent of people have done X”. Once the player has guessed a percentage, the rest of the players must guess whether or not the actual answer is higher, lower, much higher, much lower. This one worked OK when streamed. It falls into a category where you either need A LOT of people playing (because the game will get new data) or almost no one playing (because the game will use data it already has). This is one of the weaker games in the pack, but it has some interesting facts about humans. It’s best played with friends in a room so you can all talk about how many people have actually written something on a bathroom stall.
Fakin’ It is a “spot the liar” game. All the players will be given a prompt to raise their hands for something, make a face for something, or hold up a certain number of fingers. One player has no idea what the hell you are all doing and must act like they do. It’s up to everyone else to try and spot the faker. While not great for streaming, this is another good one for a room full of people. There are some funny questions and it is pretty hilarious to see when the faker has gotten something completely wrong. Fakin’ It is definitely the weakest in The Jackbox Party Pack 3, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
Tee K.O. is the biggest, conceptually, addition to The Jackbox Party Pack 3. You and your friends make drawings, then write a bunch of slogans, words, whatever. Then you get a mashup of different drawings and slogans to try and make the best t-shirt. The shirts go head-to-head trying to get your votes. At the end, all the top shirts from two rounds battle it out for ultimate supremacy. This game is awesome. You can draw whatever you want (with a limited color palette and background choice) and enter whatever slogan you want. Sometimes you will get an ultimate winner, other times the designs and slogans just won’t add up. After the game is over you can check out a gallery of all the shirts, AND BUY YOUR FAVORITE. That’s right. You can buy a shirt you and your friends just made. How cool is that? You want the max number of players for this game to maximize your shirt choices. Being in the audience for this game isn’t great because while everyone else is drawing and entering slogans, you are sitting there from 5-8 minutes waiting for them. Luckily there is a badass rock soundtrack to keep you entertained.
The Jackbox Party Pack 3 is a must buy. There is plenty to keep you coming back and if you can’t get a group of friends together hop online and stream. A lot of the games have options to make the game better for streaming. I haven’t stopped playing since I got the game and every time friends come over I ask “Have you seen the new Jackbox Party Pack yet?”. If you’re looking for a new party game, Jackbox has you covered.
