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Kittystrophe retired The Jackbox Party Pack 4
A swing and a miss. It's nice that they use the Pack format to experiment, but that means they can't all be bangers. Pack 4's best game is made obsolete by its improved sequel in Pack 9.

Fibbage 3 - A tier - The star of the pack. This version makes numerous improvements to the scoring system and audience feature, but most notably introduces Fibbage: Enough About You, which turns Fibbage into a "2 Truths 1 Lie"-style game about the current players. The 1st round is the ideal version, while the 2nd is a bit too open-ended and winds up encouraging players to spend the 1st thinking of their answers in advance.
Civic Doodle - ??? Tier - This pack's drawing game. I haven't played it.
Survive the Internet - C tier - It's no Quiplash, but it's more fun than you'd expect based on the cringe aesthetic and title.
Bracketeering - F tier - Severely undercooked and barely a game. It seems like there should be a debate phase where you try to win people over to your answer, but there are no game mechanics to support this.
Monster Seeking Monster - D tier - This one stresses me out. I think it's the combination of speed-dating (inherently stressful activity) and the lack of an equivalent "flirt for me" feature like Fibbage and Quiplash have. I could see this being a hit with the right crowd, but to me this game exists to be tried once and never returned to.

13 days ago


Kittystrophe played The Jackbox Party Pack 3
This is when Jackbox Gets Good. Instead of 2 good games, 1 mid one and 2 duds, this pack has 3 good ones, 1 mid, and only 1 dud.

Quiplash 2 - S tier - Better than Quiplash 1, worse than Quiplash 3
Trivia Murder Party - B tier - A frenetic trivia game like You Don't Know Jack but spiced up with fun minigames instead of just shouting at you. I could do without the digitally down-pitched host voice.
Guesspionage - C tier - It's Family Feud with a neon hacker aesthetic. Half the time it feels like a skillful game, and half the time they either had a flawed survey or John Q. Public is just insane.
Fakin' It - F tier - Completely non-functional over a stream, and barely functional in-person. For fans of hidden role games, Push the Button does it better.
Tee K.O. - A tier - Drawing games always have great potential, especially when the captions are player-generated too. The gauntlet format was a great idea to give the game a scoring system while maintaining a brisk pace. I have mixed feelings about the offer to print your design on a real life T-shirt at the end of each game. On one hand, it creates a memento of a joyful time that normally just vanishes, and it's a logical conclusion to a game about designing T-shirts. On the other hand, reaching a tendril of capitalism amid delight and laughter is still preying on people's looser wallets at a time of heightened emotion, and I can't find any indication of the physical shirts being ethically sourced; they don't even say the name of their printing partner, basically just "we outsourced, don't worry about it."

13 days ago


Kittystrophe retired The Jackbox Party Pack 2
While the Jackbox series is great, this is one of the weaker entries. I rarely see anyone boot it up, and haven't played half the games on it, and I feel like there are good reasons for that. You might as well just get the standalone Quiplash instead of this pack, as nothing else on it comes close.

Quiplash XL - S tier - Quiplash is awesome from the get-go. It's what fans of Cards Against Humanity think that game is like, except all submissions are a blank space to write in, so the jokes aren't already written for you, and don't always revolve around trying to be offensive. Quiplash stands out as highly repeatable in a sea of once-a-day novelties. One shortcoming of this sub-series is it feels like they never know what to do with round 3, and never give it enough time, even with extended timers.
Fibbage 2 - B tier - Trivia with social trickery via fake answers. It's Fibbage, but 2er. This sub-series doesn't get meaningfully iterated until Fibbage 3.
Bidiots - C tier - A drawing game themed around money and auctioning. As the follow-up to Drawful in the 1st pack, this feels like a straight downgrade. Bad name too.
Bomb Corp - ??? tier - Haven't played it, so it's hard for me to say how well it works.
Earwax - ??? tier - Haven't played it, though with the premise being "Quiplash but the jokes are written for you and they're all sound effects" I think I can make an educated guess that this is a D or F.

14 days ago



Kittystrophe retired The Jackbox Party Pack
A landmark that transformed the party game scene, rendered retroactively pointless by the best games getting sequels & spiritual successors with better mechanics, visuals, and accessibility options.

You Don't Know Jack - C tier - The standout of the pack in terms of visual style and constantly throwing loud novelties at the player. Stay with this one long enough and eventually you realize it's a lot of flashing lights to distract from shallow game mechanics. It's a trivia game where the real challenge is to parse confusing questions with limited time, that's about it. Wrong Answer and Jack Attack are neat concepts with poor implementation, and the latter means that final scores always give the W to whoever has the fastest reflexes and lowest device ping.
Fibbage XL - B tier - The best of this pack's 3 trivia games. You Don't Know Jack has more style but Fibbage stands the test of time with better game mechanics. Player-submitted trick answers allow an actually social game, rather than trivia devolving into parallel single-player. Not as good as Fibbage 3/4 or Trivia Murder Party.
Drawful - A tier - For my money drawing games are usually the best in the pack, including this one. Drawful uses the same trick-answer mechanic as Fibbage while enabling even more player expression through drawing instead of listening to trivia. Better than Weapons Drawn, worse than Tee K.O. and Champ'd Up, about the same as Drawful 2 & Drawful Animate.
Word Spud - D tier - The biggest gameplay standout that hasn't really been replaced by any newer Jackbox game. I can see why they never returned to it though: It's barely a game and more like a word association stim toy. Can be fun if getting high doesn't impede your reading & typing abilities.
Lie Swatter - F tier - The least interesting trivia game in a pack of 3 trivia games. There is no freeform player input, only answer true/false. It's barely a game and more like a tech demo, testing the server's ability to handle a massive number of players, what would later be better implemented as the audience feature.

14 days ago



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