[review wip, will give a rating later]

[Ok, first of all, long premise about Jackbox Games and how they came to glory with streamed party games.]

I've been eagerly wanting to play this a bit often alongside the other Jackbox party games ever since i've been recently getting into it thanks to a fellow Twitch streamer friend of mine who's got a small but pretty active userbase. I used to hear about You Don't Know Jack, Jackbox Games' titular flagship trivia game which made the company famous which also got numerous editions since 1995 up until its last standalone edition in 2013. With the popularity of mobile games uprising during 2008, Jackbox Games went on to create a mobile version of their trivia game You Don't Know Jack for iOS, and then a Facebook game version during the early 2010s. The company was known for that trivia game at that time, but something was running amok when in 2013 the Roku TV and Ouya were around, and Jackbox Games went on to experiment with other kind of 'social' games such as Clone Booth and Lie Swatter, but these titles weren't the ones that led the company towards a new direction.

It was September 2014, when Jackbox Games published Fibbage, a party bluffing game which got a huge success thanks to its unique lobby code driven multiplayer gameplay which allowed spectator play with streaming services like Twitch. From there, in the next following month, the success led the company to create what would be their new flagship game series called The Jackbox Party Pack, with the first pack including Drawful, Fibbage XL (the extended edition of Fibbage), Lie Swatter, Word Spud and the 2015 edition of You Don't Know Jack. The company would release these games not just on computer devices but also console platforms for finding more audience in any other place. And with that, each year Jackbox Games would release a new pack with quite varied party games.

This franchise was really quite known among American audiences, but later during the COVID-19 pandemic, the franchise got European language localization starting from the 2020 re-edition of Quiplash 2, which was a sequel to one of Jackbox's most picked party games. It was a point of revolution for the company which led to a huge surge of popularity around the late period of 2020 (and competed alongside other party games such as Gartic Phone, a free online game inspired from Pictionary) which lasted for nearly a year before nearly gathering nearly a thousand of average viewers in Twitch streams nowadays.

Jackbox Party Starter came along around 2022 which brought back three of the company's previously enlisted games, the ever hilarious Tee K.O. where you draw drawings and them associate them with quirky sentences or words, Trivia Murder Party 2 (not a fan of trivia games, honestly) which is a bit of trivia with some minigames placed in when you fail a trivia question (and i think that's where the actual fun comes in) and lastly the third edition of Quiplash. As a person who is mostly lonely in my free time, there's hardly ever someone like me who would set up a conference room where we could play these kind of interactive whiteboard party games, unfortunately, back then in my high school didn't take advantage of these amazing (although some of Jackbox's games aren't that best sometimes) crafted party videogames considering they DO have a pricing, but once you get to buy them, you will be able to save people's lives by enjoying these never-seen before party games, stuff that Hasbro wouldn't ever make it to the top.

After this long explanation of how the glory of Jackbox Games brought insane party fun with the power of adult jokes and shenanigans, it is about time i'd finally get to actually review the games, at least in their Party Starter version:

- Tee K.O.: I'm starting with this first because this game is one of the most appreciated party games. Tee K.O. gets you in the middle of a competition where you have to create a shirt that stands out among all the other shirts by creating a series of drawings and slogans that go together to create the shirt of your dreams. Up to 8 players can create up to 24 drawings that then are randomly picked, then the amount of slogans can be as plenty as you can. The crucial part of each round (1 & 3) is when you get to create the shirt which most of the time depending on the party group will come up with unique and smart captioned tshirts, and it really works. IT REALLY WORKS. In Round 2 & 4, the T shirts duke it out to see who's the best, but the tshirts are ordered randomly, allowing for a more improvised voting experience. The final round has you duke out against the remaining t-shirts before placing in first place. Aside from the shirts, players can gain points depending whenever they provide their own drawings and slogans, but also for creating their own shirts. This game is really plenty of fun that it got its own place here in the Party Starter Pack, aside from the fact Tee K.O. 2 only got a better drawing editor BUT with a slightly different shirt sorting.

I'm not gonna beat around the bush here: I've cried laughing more times than I can count playing this. I already loved Quiplash 2 Internashional simply because it finally gave an opportunity to play a jackbox game with an excellent Spanish localization with my buddies, and this is just more of that plus two ''new'' games, and oh boy I adore this. Granted, the price is a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit inflated, with this three-game package being similar in price to full blown Jackbox Party Packs, tho I can excuse that a bit with how cheap it does get in sales and how excellent the translation is. Still, probably the biggest drawback of this compilation, 'cuase otherwise it's pretty excellent for what it is: a small collection of little games for a group of people to play and have a laugh at, and oh boy does it succeed.

So, I think it's fair that I talked about the games included individually, not only because they are all pretty different in their approach, but also because I really believe some are better than others, so let's make a mini review for each of them, shall we?



Quiplash 3: It’s in those little moments where you and a friend give the same answer for a prompt where you realize you all share just a single neuron….

This may sound a little silly to say considering how positive I was about all this at the start but… I think I might actually prefer Quiplash 2 to this one? In that one the final round had much more variety and could be three completely things, here, while it’s not a big departure from what you do in rounds 1 and 2, it doesn’t quite reach the levels of le funny that completing comics in Quiplash 2 did. Still… I mean… it’s still fucking Quiplash, it’s still a riot to play and I’d say that I actually prefer some of the prompts here that in the previous versions, since they tend to lean to the more absurd aspect that results in even more absurd answers, and I love that. Even if they named the presentator Schmitty instead of the actual superior name that is Gutierrez, at the end of the day, peak is still peak, I love that motherfucker.

4/5




Tee K.O.: There’s no worse feeling that losing to a shirt with your own drawing AND phrase, at that point it’s just mean…

Tee K.O. is… fine, and it’s a shame I have to say that when it can get so coo coo crazy. Making multiple drawings and phrases and then combining them to create shirts and competing against one another is an incredibly inspired and fun idea, and it is fun, but sadly, it does have a couple of drawbacks that the others just don’t have. It’s the game that suffers the most by being played in smaller groups; the other games in the pack are a blast even with the minimum amount of people, but Tee K.O was clearly designed for voice calls with a ton of people, and even then, that doesn’t change the fact hat it’s so damn long to get to the point, and that’s probably the least involved of the games. Again, not bad at all, but it’s the game I come back to the least, specially when the two other options are right there.


3/5





Murder Party 2: They did it, I don’t know how but they sure did it, they made a simpler Mario Party that’s somehow more intense.

Really now, reducing Murder Party 2 to calling it a ‘’Mario Party’’ is a gross misinterpretation, because holy hell, is this game fantastic on its own merits. Combining a trivia game with a horror setting and introducing minigames and the alive and dead mechanic makes it some of the most fun multiplayer game I’ve tried in a very long while, and also probably one of the most original. The presentation, the trivia and minigames themselves, the finale… this is my favorite Jackbox game I’ve played so far by a long shot, it perfectly nails what it wants to be and, even if it’s a departure from the other games focused on absurdism, it’s still funny as hell and the tension makes it the most interesting to go back to.

A god-like way to end the collection, an outstanding multiplayer experience in almost every way.

4.5/5