Jackbox Games today revealed its latest collection of relationship ruiners I mean party games in Party Pack 11. The new Party Pack, which does not yet have a release date, has five new games on offer, with an emphasis on a loud, social experience (with one exception; I’ll get to that). I got a chance to play the new games on behalf of GamesBeat along with several other outlets, and it turned into a raucous experience even by Jackbox standards.
The new games are as follows (and keep in mind each one of these games feature voting mechanics to reward those who are the silliest):
- Doominate: Players take a prompt for something positive or otherwise wholesome and “ruin” it by adding something horrible to the prompt. Players begin with pre-written prompts, but eventually add their own things for the other players to destroy. For example, one of the other players put “Weezer” as their thing to ruin, and I responded with, “The 90s were 30 actual years ago.” (Yes, I was proud of that one, thank you for asking.)
- Suspectives: A social deduction title where players answer a series of questions in private, and then have to solve which of them is a criminal based on how they suspect the others answered those same questions. They can find out more details by interrogating other players, noir detective-style. And yes, in true Werewolf fashion, one person is the criminal and attempting to throw the others off.
- Hear Say: Players get prompts to record a myriad of sound bites, from weird noises to multi-sentence speeches or song clips. Those sound clips are then played over a number of videos. This is by far the noisiest game in the pack, and probably the noisiest Jackbox game, full stop. Anyone who isn’t comfortable being absolutely goofy on a live mic would probably not enjoy this game too much, to be honest.
- Legends of Trivia: This is probably the most involved game in Party Pack 11, taking the longest time to play properly. Players take on several traditional RPG roles (I was the axe-wielding barbarian) and engage in turn-based battles, where the enemy asks them various trivia questions and they must answer correctly. This game can technically be played without much player-to-player interaction, but pooling trivia knowledge does make things more interesting.
- Cookie Haus: Players have prompts to decorate various cookies for their late-stage capitalist boss, with the customers’ orders ranging from the simplistic to the bizarre. It’s a pretty cozy game by Jackbox standards, with ample time and tools provided to make the cookies in whatever way you see fit, with the chance to make each cookie even more weird depending on the customers’ demands.
Get your mics and headphones ready
As I said, I got the chance to preview Party Pack 11 in a Discord call with some peers, and it was without a doubt one of the loudest sessions of Jackbox I’ve ever played. Talking, singing, honking and burbling were just some of the sounds we were all making at each other.
My favorite was probably Hear Say, because it offers the biggest laughs for the smallest amount of effort. Cluck like a chicken for three seconds and you can make everyone in the room collapse in fits of giggles because that clip will be played over a very dissonant video. Legends of Trivia is also a fun time, as it has both the length and the art style of a proper RPG — heck, it is a proper RPG.
For the most part the games are very noisy this time around — between Hear Say making you sing showtunes and Suspectives requiring real-time interrogation — or very heavy on the social interaction. Cookie Haus, on the other hand, is a much more mellow experience where the players decorate cookies together in relative silence. Perhaps a group of friends would be more gregarious while doing it, but the game did stand out for me for being so much quieter than the other games in Pack 11.
Jackbox has not yet given a release date for Party Pack 11.