The Jackbox Party Pack 10 Review - A Decade Of Brilliance

Jackbox Games has been a large part of trivia entertainment since the days of the PlayStation. With Fibbage and the Jackbox Party Pack titles they catapulted themselves to become THE party game to have. With Jackbox Party Pack 10 marking a decade of Party Pack releases do they still have the magic?

What games are in the Jackbox Party Pack 10?

Jackbox Party Pack 10 comes with four entirely new games and a sequel. There's a mix of everything a Jackbox fan could be after. There's drawing, trivia, free-form answers, a social deduction game, and for the first time a rhythm game.

The games included are:

• Tee K.O. 2
• Timejinx
• FixyText
• Hypnotorious, and
• Dodo Re Mi

You might expect that coming up to a big decade marker it might be safer to go with the hits, like a new edition of Fibbage or Quiplash, but Jackbox Games instead once again iterates to give parties a new game to settle into.

While some of these games share common elements with previous titles there's enough new in the familiar to ease players in. Of this pack the game with the least evolution is Tee K.O. 2 so let's start with that one.

Tee K.O. 2 Evolves, But Not By Too Much

Tee K.O. 2 is a competition game where every player will draw up a series of pictures and slogans to be matched together and put on a T-shirt. Once each character selects their matching slogan and image they'll be entered into a single elimination bracket to see who gets voted the best.

The concept is simple and those familiar with the original game will immediately understand how to play. The evolution of Tee K.O. from the original game is that there are a number of clothing options you can use to style now including t-shirts, hoodies, and tank tops. The other large addition is a wider range of colors, and the ability to erase parts of other's designs.

While Round 1 is all about people's designs Round 2 lets you take those designs and add, or subtract from them. This opens up a brilliant avenue for comedy setting up the sequel to a joke that went so well in the first round. 

Just like the original game, you can also purchase a t-shirt, hoodie, or tank top with your design on it (regardless of whether it won or not). This is a fun option for those playing who want something a bit more out of the game.

Overall you'll be able to know if this game is for you if you enjoyed the original release. If you aren't a fan of drawing or on-the-spot slogan creation, then Tee K.O. 2 might be your miss for the game.

Timejinx Offers A Date With Destiny

In Timejinx players will be asked questions about history and the answer is always the year of something. It might be "What year did the Chicago Bears win the Super Bowl?" or "What year did a certain candy hit store shelves?"

Players will key the answers into a touchpad on their phone and depending on how close they were to the correct score they'll earn points. This game's scoring works like golf, you'll want to be trying to get as close as you can to the correct date.

The game does offer mercy to those who are historically challenged. There will always be a range of years that the game will force you to pick between and for the lowest scoring players, hints about where a specific number might be in the answer.

Being one of the aforementioned historically challenged players, I most enjoyed the minigames between rounds. You'd be placed at a party in a different generation and you'd have to guess the right response or offer definitions of slang "of the era." This was a fun blast from the past.

FixyText is Pure Chaos

FixyText is a fever dream of a game. You'll be shown a text and provided a partially completed response to that text which you need to fill out. To throw a wrench into your plan you'll be editing this response at the same time as multiple team members, and on top of that, the delete and backspace buttons don't work.

This leads to an absolute free-for-all. Typing on your phone you'll barely have enough time to see what you're doing, let alone your teammates, but you'll be hearing laughs and callouts from the opposition team as they witness gibberish.

The game itself is a lot of fun, the scoring is based on players of the opposing team selecting specific words that they found the most entertaining. It's not about the sentences or even the entire composition. You'll have just as much chance to win the game by picking nonsensical words instead of a witty sentence.

This is one of those games that the Jackbox team has put considerable work into creating a variety of moderation tools. You can play this game with absolutely no moderation, all the way up to heavy censorship of swear words and hate words.

Taking it a step further you can even have a moderator player who can remove words from the final composition before anyone is able to see it on the screen.

In Hypotorious Even You Don't Know You're The Traitor

I'm a massive fan of social deduction games so this was my personal favorite from the pack. In Hypnotorious players are assigned a role that could be anything. They could be a penguin, Frankenstein, or even a dinner show comedian.

Players will get prompts that they'll respond to in character. Then looking at your response and the response of others you need to try to group yourselves together. The catch of the game is that you don't know what category you'll be getting sorted by, and one person won't fit into either group. The categories are only revealed at the end of the game.

In my first game, the categories were flightless birds and flighted birds. People were getting assigned as a penguin, a hawk, or an emu whereas I was the Batwing. 

Answers people submit begin to help people follow the trend, the better you are at organizing yourself the more points you obtain. If you're able to correctly figure out who doesn't belong that will also net you big points.

What I enjoyed most about Hypnotorious was that everyone was coming into the experience on the back foot. You can't trust what you'll be, what anyone else will be, and if there's even a pairing for you.

Every time we hit replay it was a full reset of everyone's expectations, whether we'd plan more cooperatively or keep things closer to the chest.

Dodo Re Mi Is A Surprise Hit

Dodo Re Mi is Jackbox Games first try at a rhythm game and I was blown away by how much fun it was. I went into this experience thinking it would be similar to other Jackbox Games, you play a few rounds and a minigame and then there's a score at the end. I was so wrong.

Loading up the game you're greeted with a Guitar Hero-style tracklist with a mix of original compositions, themes from other Jackbox Games, and open-license music. After picking a song you'll get to pick your instrument.

Instruments are sorted by their difficulty, what part of the song they are, and what sensible or completely wild instrument they are. An easy instrument might be a Kazoo that you slide with the notes on your screen, or you could have a five-note 'mouth drum' part.

On your phone screen, you'll have circles falling from the top of your screen that you need to hit when they line up with your note buttons at the bottom of your screen. It immediately brought back memories of playing games like Tap Tap Revenge on my iPod Touch in High School. 

Not all tracks will be unlocked when you load up the game. Instead, Jackbox Games was creative with how you'd unlock further tracks including complete songs, perfecting songs, completing all parts in a piece of music, and more.

I immediately got hooked on the idea of unlocking just one more batch of songs.

The Jackbox Party Pack 10 Review | Final Thoughts

There's been a few Jackbox Party Packs in recent years where I've felt even if there are good games, that a lot of them have been forgettable. This is not one of those Party Packs.

Jackbox Party Pack 10 doesn't just hit all of the major genre of Jackbox Games, but each game is an absolute blast to play.

My personal favorites were Hypnotorious and Dodo Re Mi, even though Dodo Re Mi was more faithful to the Rhythm Game formula it's been so long since I've played one of those that it was fun to get into with a group of friends.

The Jackbox Party Pack was reviewed on PC via Steam over the course of 8 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.