Would love for a recommendation on which Party Pack to buy

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TheChris

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Hey gang!

So I’m planning on buying one of the Jackbox Party Pack$ to play with my family leading up to New Year’s Eve but would love the Giantbomb’s community opinion on which one I should buy?

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Fear_the_Booboo

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Third one is the best for my money but it really depends on your crowd. Trivia Murder Party is a good Trivia game, but Tee K-O (the t-shirt game) and Quiplash 2 are just the best comedy things of all the Jackbox games in my opinion. Fakin' it is also great fun, but I've found it to be harder to get a group used to it, that being said the groups that liked it on my end absolutely loved it. The third pack has just one so so game, so I feel it's also the most consistent package.

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vortextk

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#3  Edited By vortextk

I don't know about any one clean version to get, let's run through my favorite shit.

Jackbox 1 favs: Fibbage XL

That's it. There are some other games on there that I could see liking, maybe not with my group, but that's the only classic game out of the first pack for me. Try to pass off your fake answer to a weird statement as the real answer, and try to guess the real answer yourself. Part trivia, part lying to your friends. Lie swatter, word spud and drawful I can see having places in game nights but they've never clicked. Drawful being probably the best out of those? I would think You Don't Know Jack would be a very easy game for people to have fun with, but almost without fail people hate how they ask the questions, they don't understand the question itself, and the trivia part never goes over super well either. I like trivia even when I don't know anything but YDKJ has failed for me almost every time I put it on.

Jackbox 2 favs: Fibbage 2, Quiplash XL, Bomb Corp

Fibbage 2 is more fibbage, that's good, quiplash is fibbage without "right answers". Instead of lying, you're just trying to complete a phrase in the best way you can. Raunchy, funny, morbid, whatever works with your group. Since quiplash has no right answers you can see the same prompts again without someone having a leg up because they know the answer, unlike fibbage which has a natural shelf life if you keep playing it. Earwax and bidiots are the duds for me here.

Earwax seems too simple, put sounds together from a limited pool to match what the judge would think is best, and bidiots always seemed like a lot of rules and not a ton of fun. Bombcorp is weird. I think it's super neat and fun and co-operative, but the checkpointing is bad when you start making it further into the game. Fail the 4th bomb of a day and you restart the entire day over with the same dialogue and similar style bombs every time for that day, repeat. Unless you have a group super dedicated, I find the game extremely cool but most groups can't last more than a few days in game before you just keep repeating failures and turn it off.

Jackbox 3 favs: Quiplash 2, Trivia Murder Party, Tee K.O.

This is a real solid pack. More quiplash, very very good, no fibbage, which is ok because again the nature of fibbage means you can cheat when you play it a lot and know the answers. Trivia Murder Party has -always- gone over better than YDKJ for me. It's a little macabre and funny and has a good tone that has universally panned out well. Tee K.O. is the stand out game here however, and I hate/suck at all things drawing. There is a lot of setup time but the pay off is almost always extremely good. If the majority of your party lacks anyone that likes to draw you might still be ok here if people find something stupid or funny they like to try over and over in different ways.

I have literally never seen Guesspionage even played, I got nothing. Fakin' it I think is neat but with some of the other caveat ones, you gotta be prepared. You need to be in the mind set of almost like a board game or card game that has players pitted directly against each other but in secret. If you just want to see the funniest things on screen you can say or make, other games do it better, but if your group is just calm enough to pay attention to everything going on(or maybe not) this one can be real cool; it just hasn't been for me.

Jackbox 4 favs: Fibbage 3, Survive the Internet

Mixed bag overall for me, but holy crap what a stand out game it contains. Fibbage 3 is good and one of the additions to it is that it'll ask questions about players, letting it change the formula a bit. The elephant in the room is Survive the Internet. It is -fantastic-. It is the single best game in my opinion up to this box, in the running for best in the series so far even. It's a simple thing, you get prompted to make like a generic phrase and then everyone else gets one of those phrases and makes another part of the whole. So the initial prompt might get you to write how you feel about baseball, I get that prompt response from another player ("America's fucking past time") and then am told that the prompt is the first comment in a video entitled _____(fill in).

It's so good that I can not do it justice. I fucking love the chill music in the background while you're answering, every single way they prompt you, even the weaker one with pictures. We've never laughed so much, it's almost the only thing I've ever bothered with in this pack because it's that good.

Monster Seeking Monster has those elements I don't like that kinda need to be explained, played through once or twice to even understand what's going on and then has a larger meta game towards the whole thing. We've tried like once or twice and failed, but I did like it some watching it on GBeast once. Again, I think it takes a like minded group ready for a small board game type experience and competition, not just laughs though they'll probably come too.

Civic Doodle always seems funniest for how stupid the drawings get but honestly, that's about it for my group. Drawing on a phone is hard, continually drawing on a phone ontop of an existing picture with little talent is worse. It's a funny to build on what other people are drawing but there isn't a ton of "game" or unbridled laughs in there for me.

Bracketeering I just don't know? Reading the description doesn't sound that exciting but it's so hard to tell and I haven't seen it.

Jackbox 5 favs: Split the Room, Mad Verse City

Oh boy. Split the Room is so neat. You know all that quiplash(and to an extent fibbage) you've been playing? Trying to make real gut busters? You can't do that here. You need to be methodical; not in a big meta game what's really going on sense, but you need an answer that SOME people like, but not everyone. The more split up the answers are between your phrase/given phrase, the better you do. The aesthetic is great and basically everyone that plays loves the twilight zone tone. Filling in for the blank phrase will stump you more often than the other fill in games because you do want something that people mull over and may pick either option, depending what type of person they might be. You can still be funny, but it's more of a clever gotcha funny. We all love this game.

Mad Verse City. It has a weird menu after you enter your prompts to mess with stuff on the screen that's kinda whatever. It's a little vague and tough to answer the prompts in the first place; I hope you know what adjectives and adverbs are and can distinguish tense with verbs or pay attention to "plural/singular". Also, got any rhyming or sick rap skills? They might help too. It can take a couple tries to understand everything the game is asking of you, but this is hands down the best game up until and since survive the internet for my group. We hit good rhymes, bad rhymes, sick burns, terribly fucked up burns; but it's all so good. You can be so creative but still need to follow a couple of rules and prompt ideas since the game is writing nearly 50% of your rap verse; you control the last word in lines 1&3(prompted to kinda fit sentence) and the entirety of lines 2&4. Hope you got chops.

Same complaints about YDKJ as before. Patently stupid takes time and a bit of presentation/role playing but can be I think a great game; it requires some work. Zeeple dome is literally a trash mobile game and I don't understand why it's even in here. Should've been just the four games.

TLDR:

So? I think you can mostly skip Jackbox 1 and 2. Bomb corp in 2 is unique, but everything else is kinda done later with more(bigger versions of fibbage/quiplash later) or better(tee k.o. over drawful) and anything left I have found to be the weaker parts of those games anyway. Jackbox 3 and 5 have the most amount of good games over any of the other packs in total for me and my group. However, we played survive the internet 5-6 times almost exclusively for several hours on different nights meaning 4 is honestly still a very good pick up.

I don't think you can go wrong with 3-5, any or all. You don't get drawing or the secretive competitive games in 5, but don't have any real trivia in 4.

If I had my way, all of these games would be sold separately on a games as a service type offering where you could buy upgrades to fibbage(2, xl, etc)/quiplash as dlc and the best games like survive the internet and mad verse city separately from their entire packs, but I get why it isn't done that way.

I hope that was information overload. Been trying to get game nights together fairly often and while some cool VR stuff has been fun to watch since I bought it for my ps4, jackbox games are the highlights and mainstays of every single night.

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Captain_Insano

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I think Jackbox 1 still holds up super well

- You Don't Know Jack

- Fibbage

- Drawful

They are all great

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Acura_Max

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#5  Edited By Acura_Max

I think you can't go wrong with Jackbox party pack 3. The games are out the pack are very good. And if you want fan favorites from the other packs (fibbage or drawful), you can buy them separately.

If you're playing on the pc and can stream on the TV using a steam link, I would keep an eye on sites like Fanatical or the jackbox website. They will tell you when there is a sale on these games. Throughout the year, I have found that all the jackbox party packs (except Jackbox party pack 5) have gone on sale at Fanatical for as low as $5. no doubt we will see the same deals next year.

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RAWKPARTEE

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3 is the biggest hit when I played with family.

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TheChris

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I ended up getting the third one as that one seems like to be the unanimously most well liked and it ended up being a hit. Thanks guys!