[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.
[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.