My friends and I are big fans of the Jackbox Party Pack series, so it was a given that we would try out the latest addition to the series and see if it measures up. In short, it does! We had an absolute blast playing the variety of games included in this pack, sometimes laughing so hard we could hardly breath.
Fibbage. Fibbage 3 is an alright addition, but the other Fibbage game mode, titled “Fibbage: Enough About You” turned out to be my favorite in this pack. This new mode takes what made Fibbage fun and makes it personal. My friends and I had a lot of fun entering the most bizarre truths and lies about ourselves and trying to pick out the truth among them. The game was equally fun when played with family. It really tests how well you know those playing with you (and how good a liar you can be).
Survive the Internet. The game where witty responses win all. Given another player’s response to a random question, what kind of headline (or product, location, whatever the category may be) would make that response look the most absurd. Another great addition to the pack, and with my favorite visuals across all games in the pack. The game plays through the Internet browser of what looks to be a Windows 98 knockoff. On top of the fantastic visuals, Survive the Internet rewards players for making his/her friends look bad, something my friends and I are already good at. As such, we felt right at home with this game and plenty of laughs ensued.
Civic Doodle. Civic Doodle is easily the most laughter-inducing game included in this iteration of the Party Pack. The concept is brilliant: given a canvas with some line or shape on it, who can come up with a better addition given this base? We had an absolute blast making the stupidest of additions to each other’s drawings. We somehow turned a small squiggle of a line into a stick figure wearing a goat head, with both the stick figure and goat head wearing eye patches over each eye, for a total of four eye patches (along with an eggplant off in the corner for whatever reason). Several artistic masterpieces were born while playing this one.
Monster Seeking Monster. I found this game to be weaker compared to the others, but it was still fun to play. It requires a certain degree of strategy, at least more than any of the other games in the pack. The player basically has to score dates with other players and play around his/her special monster power. To do so the player must exchange flirtatious texts with the other players, keeping in mind his/her own monster power. The game then shows the messages exchanged and whether or not the players hooked up or if one was rejected. One aspect that I disliked about this was the fact that the game does not show all of the texts exchanged after each round in certain cases. If a player hooks up with another player, any other player that attempted to hook up with either of the two that scored a date will not have his/her messages displayed. Instead the game just shows that they were rejected. Plenty of missed laughs with some of the messages my friends and I were throwing around.
Bracketeering. I found Bracketeering to be the weakest of the games. Sure it can be enjoyable at times, but it simply does not compare to the rest of the games in the pack. It is also the only game that supports more than eight players (up to 16!), so maybe I just did not play it with a proper amount of players, as our largest play session was only six strong. It is basically a game about voting in a bracket, although with a twist. In one round, we were given the question “what is a turn-on for you?”. We had the usual responses, such as “long hair” and “nice abs”, then we had my super witty response: “pressing the power button”. Well, after we put in our answers for the bracket, the question changed to “what is a great skill to include on a resume” and then the voting commenced until a winner was found (and what a great skill “pressing the power button” turned out to be!). Then after moving onto the last round, the questions started changing after every round of voting. It can get quite bizarre, but this ended up being our least played game in the pack.
Overall, Party Pack 4 is a solid entry to the series. There may be a couple weaker games included, but the majority are a blast to play. I have played it with both friends and family and will definitely keep coming back to it in the future. As for how I rank each game included in this party pack, I would rank them as such:Â Fibbage: Enough About You > Civic Doodle > Survive the Internet > Fibbage 3 > Monster Seeking Monster > Bracketeering.
You can buy the Jackbox Party Pack 4 here on Steam.
I was provided a free review copy of the game in order to write this review. Read more about how I do my game reviews here.
cublikefoot 