The first Jackbox Party Pack was released more than a decade ago, a somewhat horrifying fact that reminds me of my own mortality. Since then, the series has been a staple at social functions for many people, myself included. Recently, other companies have begun hopping on the party games trend, like Netflix’s recent multiplayer venture and Amazon Luna’s new GameNight feature. However, Mike Bilder, CEO of Jackbox Games, isn’t worried about the competition.
I recently spent an hour playing the new Jackbox Party Pack 11 with Bilder and developers Brooke Breit, Rich Gallup, and Tim Sniffen, and I’m inclined to agree with him — Amazon’s AI-powered Snoop Dogg is no match for genuinely original gameplay with the distinct style only Jackbox possesses.
This untouchable uniqueness is especially clear in the latest iteration, which was released Oct. 23 for all major platforms and is the first pack in the franchise to contain no sequels whatsoever. “We really wanted to try and do something unique this year,” Bilder says in a video call with Polygon, “and there were a lot of great pitches. I mean, every year we have lots of pitches, but we had a lot of really good and interesting concepts this last year.”
“Rather than just lean on doing a sequel,” Bilder continues, “we wanted to kind of swing for the fences, so hopefully people really enjoy it. We’re very proud of it. I think it’s a very unique pack, and hopefully strikes a nerve with folks and they enjoy it.”
He isn’t exaggerating when he says there were a lot of pitches — by Gallup’s count, there were over 40 potential minigames that were iterated upon before landing on the five included in the pack. The five chosen still maintain the core aspects fans have come to expect from the series, likea drawing game and a trivia game, but the way the team manages to continually have fresh takes on well-trodden mechanics is nothing short of amazing.
Keeping up with the competition
When it comes to other brands coming for the party game crown, Bilder is unbothered, pointing to the talent of the Jackbox staff — which is only about 70 people total — as the company’s greatest strength. “We have an incredibly talented group of creative people in the studio, and we’ve been doing this for a while,” Bilder says. “We have learned what doesn’t work, and we’ve learned what does work, and we bring new talent into the studio.”
“We certainly welcome competition. It’s going to happen, and it’s good for us — keeps us on our toes,” he continues, “But I do think we have kind of some secret sauce and uniqueness to what is Jackbox, and what is our comedy and our tone and our presentation, and we’re just going to keep refining that.”
Breit echoes these statements, and highlights how high levels of personal involvement with the games help shape them into something special. “I think we have always excelled at what we do specifically because of the authenticity of our games and the voices of the people that come together to make them,” Breit says. “I always talk about the fact that we are playing these games constantly together, so it is a very social vibe in the development, and I really think that shows in our games — that we are making and producing and creating things that we enjoy playing with each other.”
That joy and social connection the team cultivates and feeds from while designing the games absolutely shines through in each one. It was evident during our playthrough that even now, after so much time spent on the project, they all still enjoy playing each of the games they’ve had a hand in creating. It’s not just because the games are fun — which they are — but because they encourage human connection.
The games of Jackbox Party Pack 11
The minigames Doominate, Suspectives, Cookie Haus, Hear Say, and Legends of Trivia make up the roster this time around. Brooke Breit served as game director for Doominate, which is all about twisting the things you love into something horrible. Players input their favorite things, then others add a caveat that makes it awful. A personal favorite of mine from our playthrough was the ruining of “crisp lemonade on a hot day,” which Breit modified with “crisp from the starch…starchy starchy lemonade.”
“How quickly will we pull Deven into our inside Jackbox jokes?” Rich Gallup, director of production at Jackbox, joked at the beginning of our session. It turns out, almost immediately — not even just in terms of inside jokes, but feeling part of the group.
This became clear during Suspectives, which remains one of my favorites in the pack, even though the entire development team voted me as the guilty party when I was completely innocent. The social deduction game begins with players answering simple questions, like “Do you lift?” and “What does a carburetor do?” which are then used as evidence, with the game providing information like “Suspect does not know what a carburetor does.”
The game is designed for gumshoe-style chaos. At one point, I tried to turn a questioning session around on Rich Gallup. “Am I allowed to ask you things too? What’s the last picture you took?” I inquired.
“No, you’re not,” he replied, but Brooke Breit quickly backed me up.
“Yes you are, Deven!” she yelled, followed right behind by Tim Sniffen, director of Suspectives, who declared, “Don’t let him bully you!”
Perhaps it’s just because I’m a bad artist, but Jackbox drawing games always have a certain level of vulnerability to them. Cookie Haus, which is centered around dessert decoration, maintains this, tasking players with representing off-the-wall concepts in cookie form. The prompt “Early attempts at inventing the saxophone” elicited results that were both horrifying and, in multiple cases, vaguely phallic. “This is a compliment when I say this,” Breit commented on two of the results, “these are both the worst.”
Hear Say, a vocal improvisation game that’s the first to make use of the phone’s microphone, is a game that truly needs to be heard to be appreciated. Hearing the CEO of Jackbox Games emulate “sounds you’d make during a good massage” and “singing after you just inhaled a lot of helium” has permanently altered my brain chemistry.
Legends of Trivia is the most collaborative game of the pack, as well as arguably the most elaborate Jackbox minigame ever made. Gallup revealed that the game, which had the working title Trivia RPG, was held back from the last pack specifically to give it the depth it deserved. The Dungeons & Dragons-esque trivia adventure has three worlds, each taking about half an hour to complete. Thankfully, players are able to save their progress and return to their adventure later.
Players can choose from several classes, like sorcerer and ranger, to form a group of adventurers on a trivia-laden journey. During combat, players who get the multiple-choice trivia questions correct will receive gold and deal damage against monsters; those who get questions wrong will take a hit. Groups are highly incentivized to work together, and you really learn a lot about everyone’s specific sections of knowledge.
The longevity of the Jackbox Party Pack
After an hour with such an original group of games, it’s hard to imagine a world in which Jackbox is dethroned by large corporations offering up AI Snoop Dogg and the ability to play Boggle on your TV. Even hot off the launch of Party Pack 11, which currently sits at very positive reviews on Steam, the team isn’t slowing down.
“One of Jackbox’s superpowers is our speed,” Gallup says, “and a thorough green-lighting process allows us to really capitalize on that speed. This is a studio that makes five bespoke games every year. Every year! That’s nuts.”
Gallup was visibly excited as he delved into how the developers at Jackbox are constantly creating. “When we are coming up with new games, we want ideas to come from everyone and everywhere,” he says. “If you have a neat idea, we have Slack channels you just fire up like, ‘Hey, can an engineer help me with this?’ Because we don’t know which one’s going to be the next one until we’ve played it a bunch of times and we’ve iterated on it.”
Though their creative gears are constantly turning, the team also has an arsenal of past ideas to pull from when the time is right. “Those ideas that don’t make it,” Gallup continues, “they get safely stored in various folders to be pulled out in the future and try it again.”
Jackbox Party Pack 11 proves that even 11 entries in, the franchise has no shortage of strong ideas. With recent innovations like the Jackbox Megapicker, a game launcher that lets players access all their owned packs in one place, and an ongoing integration with smart TVs, it’s also become increasingly easy to enjoy minigames from across the franchise. With both accessibility and originality, Jackbox remains the pinnacle of party games.
