Jackbox Party Pack 9 Delivers a New Round of Fun, Clever Party Games
Jackbox Party Pack 9 takes familiar and successful ideas from previous packs and stretches them into a handful of largely new, experimental, clever party games. Like every pack, not every game’s a winner, but even the worst Jackbox game makes for effective social lubricant and some great laughs with friends.
This time around, the lineup consists of one returning classic, Fibbage 4, and four new entries: Junktopia, Quixort, Roomerang and Nonsensory. Fibbage 4 is familiar territory for most people who’ve played the franchise at this point, since nearly half the packs have an iteration of Fibbage in them, but each game reps many of the tried-and-true elements of the Jackbox experience. The new games still have plenty of opportunities for players to caption things with quippy remarks and make crude drawings, but if Jackbox were just about putting fart jokes and phalluses on the TV, the novelty would’ve worn off years ago.
What keeps me and many of my friends coming back year after year is the connective tissue—the game’s prompts, concepts and scenarios that set us up for lasting in-jokes and room-shaking laughs. The ninth entry in the series still delivers on that front, though perhaps not with the same aplomb as some of my favorite entries, like 3 and 7.
Fibbage 4 is, as it sounds, all about slipping clever white lies past other players by combining general savvy with believable lies. Categories range from legal cases involving bees to the late Paul Newman’s driving skills. The eclectic mix of hyperspecific topics works better than your garden variety trivia game because players with knowledge about common topics like sports, entertainment or geography aren’t as easily rewarded. It also makes for some hilarious guesses at already absurd truths.
Junktopia takes elements from games like Bidiots and Talking Points from packs past and twists them into a fun presentation-style minigame. Players are given the option to choose one of three tchotchkes that they’ll need to buy then flip by convincing other players that the object (usually something bizarre like a scary naked doll or a stiletto that’s been made to look like a goldfish) is, in fact, worth buying. The player that makes the biggest profit at the end of the game wins. The developers try to infuse some extraneous risk-vs-reward mechanics in the shopping stage by allowing players to try and haggle for a lower price on their desired oddity.
Whether or not they’re successful is entirely up to chance, making it feel like an unnecessary step that breaks up the game’s already shaky pace. Plus, after a few runs at Junktopia, successfully haggling, outright deciding not to haggle, or failing—which increases the price—never seemed to have an impact on who won. A running complaint that a lot of my friends had with this pack was how long each game took. While I don’t necessarily agree that they took too long to play, I did find that many of the new games (Junktopia included) have some pacing issues that let what should be raucous stuff get a bit dull at times. Adding in extra decisions that don’t have much bearing over the final outcome of the game or your interactions with other players really highlights the problem here: there’s too much stuff happening between the best parts of the game.
Once players name their item and make up a few fun facts about said ware, it’s off to the races. Junktopia really shines when players are doing their best to sell a dusty old bottle or a rusted oil drum to the other players. It’s not quite as fun as Talking Points (which might be my favorite Jackbox game period) since the element of improvised chaos isn’t there. That said, it’s a great equivalent for players who aren’t as comfortable talking extemporaneously about a topic.
