Summary
When the members of Achievement Hunter (rest in peace, Rooster Teeth) played Fibbage in a now-deleted Let’s Play in 2014, I remember immediately showing my friends. We purchased the firstJackboxParty Pack so we could play Fibbage, too, and you could always tell which was the actual answer, because the other options were nonsense. We never voted for the most convincing lie, which is how the game is meant to be played, instead picking whichever fill-in-the-blank phrase made us laugh the hardest.
As the years passed and Jackbox released new Party Packs, we all took turns buying the newest one, periodically refreshing the catalyst for game night hysterics. Jackbox evenings almost always ended in cry-laughter, regardless of the group I played with, and as happy as I am that I have such awesome people in my life to play with, I’ve also got to hand it to Jackbox for facilitating so much goofiness.
Over time, we inevitably settled on favorite games within each pack. Quiplash and Drawful’s multiple iterations have been popular not just for us, but for most Jackbox fans. I’ve only barely resisted the temptation to purchase some of our finer works in Tee K.O. There are at least a dozen screenshots from Mad Verse City of the sickest burns I’ve either dished out or taken in robot rap battles.
Jackbox’s variety has never let us down, but it is pretty easy to fall into a routine when you play only a few games from the roster. With Jackbox recently launching the Decade Bundle, featuringall ten Party Packsto celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the series, it was the perfect time to check out some of what my friends and I missed out on.
The Jackbox Decade Bundle Facilitates Straying From Your Norm
As such, when our schedules finally aligned, I gathered my old group of friends once again to play the Bundle with me. There werefive of us playing, a group of people I love but don’t often see, finally crammed into someone’s living room again for the first time in years. Naturally, we had to dive back into the classics, enjoying a few rousing rounds of Quiplash first, but my friends were all on board with trying out games from different Packs as well.
First up was Earwax from the second Party Pack, since I’d seen a few YouTubers play it. One person chooses a prompt, and everyone else in the group must choose two sounds as their reply without hearing their options first, going only off what they’re named. The sounds range from clearly defined things like phones ringing, to gross-out options like a variety of bathroom-centric noises, to left-field options like a man shouting, “Who wants hot dogs?!”
How am I supposed to sit down with my friends, listen to the entirety of, “Male Urinating Into Toilet (A Lot)” for15 uninterrupted seconds,and not choose it as the correct answer for, “I wonder what’s going to happen if I stick my head into this weird hole”?
Next up was Patently Stupid, a Party Pack 5 game that tasks you with sketching an invention to solve a problem your friends came up with. You then name it, give it a tagline, and stand before the group to give an elevator pitch for your work.Imagine pitching somethingon Shark Tank, but with your drunk friends inventing non-issues for you to solve with doodles instead of millionaire moguls funding your real-life innovation.
Finally came Push the Button from Party Pack 6. Here, your spaceship has been infested with between one and three aliens (depending on your group size), and you’ll be assigned the role of alien or human in secret. The humans run a series of tests to weed out the aliens, but my favorite was when the game gave agree or disagree prompts where the aliens got an ever-so slightly different suggestion than the humans. If you make a weird choice as an alien, you need to justify it – when the group is asked about scary horror movie villains and one of our mom’s names gets mixed in with the likes of Freddy Krueger or Pennywise, eyebrows naturally start to raise.
Is The Jackbox Decade Bundle Worth It?
I went to bed that night with a stitch in my side and a smile on my face because of the hours we spent being ridiculous. It was the perfect excuse to round up my friends again for the first time in who knows how long, pour a few drinks, and laugh ourselves silly, but with different games from our usuals this time.
We’re already planning to gather again soon - either in person or online, another perk of the Jackbox gamesbeing phone-based- to try out other games, too. Jackbox has always been about helping youmake goofy memories with your people, and with all 50 games at my disposal now in the Decade Bundle, I’m looking forward to all the weird new ways my friends and I will find to make each other laugh now after we spent ten years sticking to the same few games.
