I'd hoped that would stay the case for the eighth pack. It's annoying (and expensive) to swap between several packs just to find the good games, and there's finally one that has nearly all hits. But I also find myself judging it more harshly than it deserves simply because I was so pleased with the last pack. Overall, this Jackbox Party Pack is as uneven as many of its predecessors. And if you're playing over Discord, good luck communicating with just your team. If you're not sitting next to your teammates, then debating your answers can be awkward. This game is also one of those that can suffer based on the arrangement of the people you're playing with. But once you're done laughing at the joke the game made, you're left with a befuddling game mechanic where you're trying to guess how other people rank random pirate names. The final question in our game was ranking which pirates you'd want on your crew, with names like Orson Burnsboats, which is kind of funny, sure. The aesthetic of the game is nice, but it suffers from being pretty unbalanced. Then, players have to guess the overall rankings in order to progress through a spooky cave. For a trivia game, there are a lot more elements of chance than in the TMP titles, which can take the wind out of the sails of players who enjoy the competition.Īnd finally, there's The Poll Mine which groups players into teams and asks them to rank things like the best things to look for in a vacation spot, or the worst Christmas songs. It's not bad, per se, but players have to answer questions to earn slices of a Wheel of Fortune-style wheel and then earn enough points to spin the wheel, and then players can win only if they luck into landing on a certain spot. The Wheel of Enormous Proportions is an obvious attempt to include a trivia game that's not just another Trivia Murder Party, and it shows. That's not great on its own, but it's especially bad for a game where layers of social deduction and deception are piled on top of already-complex game mechanics. I've played a lot of Jackbox games that just aren't very engaging, but this was the first one I'd played in a while where the whole group didn't even know what to do.
THE JACKBOX PARTY PACK 2 PS4 YOUTUBE FULL
It took a full play-through of the game for my group to figure out how it even works, and most of us didn't even get there by the end. And it's around this time that you ask yourself “Wait, aren't we all detectives? Why are we also all murderers? What's going on?” If you guess right, you successfully murder the accomplice. Then, you're asked to pick from the other players' accomplices to murder, and guess which of the other players brought that character along. You're asked to name an “accomplice,” but it was difficult to discern why or what criteria to use to name them.
That might've been enough information to process, but the accomplice mechanic made things even more confusing. It's also unclear what this has to do with a murder mystery until later in the game.
Instead, this game had a very brief tutorial trying to explain that players needed to hide their calling card (the letter in their name) inside a drawing of their prompt, but this tutorial played while players could start drawing, which split the group's attention.
Many Jackbox games come with lengthy-bordering-on-tedious tutorials for first-time players. If that doesn't totally make sense, that's how we felt.