Jackbox Party Pack 11is the latest installment in thelong-running comedy minigame seriesthat has introduced countless partygoers to games likeQuiplash,Fibbage, andTrivia Murder Party. While the newest pack still has many of the broad concepts players have some to expect - there’s still a drawing minigame, for example, and a trivia title - the 11th entry brings with it five completely original concepts.
I recently had theopportunity to try all the new minigames -Cookie Haus,Doominate,Hear Say,Legends of Trivia, andSuspectives- with a group of journalists to gain a better understandingof what to expect from the upcoming pack. After two hours spent across the five games, I left the Discord call smiling and having slightly lost my voice from yelling,which I think is exactly what should happen after a good round ofJackbox.
Doominate Is About Being The Best At Being The Worst
Take What’s Pure & Absolutely Ruin It
Doominateis all about adding caveats to nice things to make them terrible. Each round, players will be given some perfectly normal things, like a VR headset, and are instructed to ruin them, like a VR headset that can only be used on spreadsheets. Then two go head to head, with everyone voting for who ruined each thing more.
There’s also a sort of reversal round, where something previously ruined can be redeemed. For example, during my gameplay, the concept of meeting your hero was ruined by the fact “they’ve read all your posts,” but then this was saved with a new addendum: “and they liked them all.”
Finding creative ways to ruin things was quite fun, and this game, perhaps more than any of the others in the pack,seems perfectly designed to bring out the absolute worst in people in a hilarious way. Had I been playing in a group of close friends, it’s definitely the sort of minigame I could see them absolutely scraping the bottom of the barrel for in terms of depravity.
Cookie Haus Is Interpretive Cookie Design
Bring Customers’ Weird Creative Visions To Life
Cookie HausisParty Pack 11’s drawing game. Instead of designing shirts or wrestling champions, this time around players will be designing custom-made cookies. After making a cookie avatar, they’ll be given a customer’s order - something like “things found in medieval times” or “medication side effects” - and need to bring them to life with icing and sprinkles.
Unlike a lot of drawing games that have been seen throughoutJackbox Party Packentries, thecookie canvas allows for a bit more freedom of interpretation for each prompt. Things can be a bit more abstract, aesthetically speaking - for something found in medieval times, for example, I chose the black plague, which I represented in a black cookie with red spots.
Cookie Haushad a comprehensive set of cookie decoration tools, and the 3D nature of the icing and toppings made for a fun slight twist on the typical drawing game formula. It almost had a slight cozy vibe, which feels odd to say about a game where I artistically represented the black plague, but something about making baked goods with friends just conjures that atmosphere.
Hear Say Will Make You Honk Like An Angry Goose
An Audio Comedy Game That’s All About The Delivery
In comedy prompt games likeQuiplash, players can type the most horrible things imaginable, but they can take solace in the fact that they don’t have to read them aloud - that is not the case withHear Say. Players utilize their phone’s microphone to record a series of prompts, ranging from sound effects to multi-sentence bits.
My first prompt was simple: I had to make the sound of an angry goose, which immediately awakened something weird and feral within me. From there, the prompts only got weirder and more delightful. Hearing recordings played back of writers I respect wherein they had to explain, in the fanciest way possible, that they’d pooped their pants is a joy I can’t even begin to describe.
This game produced some of the most audible laughs from me out of the five we played, thanks to the pure ridiculousness it inspired from every participant. Itopens up a whole new realm of comedy that you simply can’t get from reading the written word; the closestJackboxhas come previously to this concept is probablyJoke Boat, but this improves upon the idea immensely.
Trivia Is A Team Effort In Legends of Trivia
Fight Monsters With Multiple Choice Knowledge
If you’ve ever wanted to beat up an orc by knowing the correct lyrics to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,”Legends of Triviais the game for you. Players begin by choosing between all the typical fantasy class characters like a sorceress and warrior, then proceed on a journey across a mythical land where knowledge is quite literally power.
Along the way, the party will encounter lots of trivia-loving enemies who will ask them multiple-choice questions across a wide range of subjects, many of which have a few correct answers. Getting questions correct will land hits on the monsters - the more players get it right, the faster they’ll take one down. Between rounds, players can visit shops to purchase things like healing or damage potions to use during future battles.
The stakes are neverthathigh - if players die in battle, they simply revive using a D20 to determine how much health they get back - but it stillputs a fun fantasy twist on theJackboxtrivia game lineup after so many horror-basedTrivia Murder Partyentries. It’s also one of the longestJackboxgames to date, which makes the concept feel overall more fleshed out and elaborate.
Suspectives Makes Everyone A Hardbroiled Gumshoe
The Art Of Accusing Your Friends
I spoke toSuspectives' game directorearlier this year and learned a lot about the game, which made this the one I was looking forward to trying the most. The game begins with players answering a series of innocuous questions, such as: how do you feel about theme parks? Can you finish this song lyric? Who was your first celebrity crush? Afterward, one player is secretly deemed the criminal, and the investigation begins.
The investigators are given pieces of evidence one at a time, like that the culprit was overheard describing theme parks as “crowded,” and then one player selects another to grill over said fact. Of course, for the criminal,this means a lot of hilarious lying under pressure about ridiculous things, like the writer who wound up being the culprit who had to adamantly defend that their childhood crush wasn’t David Bowie.
While this was clearly a game that would work better for a group that knows each other a bit better, even the cursory knowledge my colleagues had about one another was able to suffice. One of the pieces of evidence, for example, was that the criminal didn’t know the lyrics to “Style” by Taylor Swift, and two of the writers I knew were quick to jump to my defense because there was “no way” I would ever miss a Swift lyric, which made me feel incredibly seen.
Jackbox Party Pack 11 Is A New Generation Of Fun
Fresh, Promising Ideas For Multiplayer Antics
Although some players may miss the inclusion of some fan-favoriteJackboxgames, like another iteration ofFibbage, as someone who hasclosely followed the series for many years,I found it incredibly refreshing for a pack to contain exclusively new concepts. Each of the games feels fully-realized, with unique themes and aesthetics and what feel like fresh takes on concepts like trivia and drawing.
I can see a lot of these minigames being a big hit at get-togethers with friends, and I’m quite excited to see how games likeDoominateandSuspectivesplay out with a group of people who know one another better.Jackbox Party Pack 11feels like one of the most original entries the series has seen in a while, with so manyrecentJackboxgamesbuilding more upon previous ideas than breaking new ground.
