Video Gamers Podcast - Gaming Quick Takes - Jackbox Party Pack 5

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

From gaming hosts Josh and Paul, we're bringing you even more gaming content each week.  Gaming Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Shazam! Boom! Hey guys, Paul here with another Quick Take episode. Thank you so much for your support of the show. We really do appreciate it. And what I want to talk to you guys about today are the Jackbox Party Packs. If you are not familiar with these, you're in for a real treat. These are collections of games that you can play with groups of friends. And one of the really nice benefits of Jackbox is that these are games that allow you to play with very large groups of people.

So if you ever have like a family gathering or a whole lot of friends over at once, Jackbox can basically work with any size group, which is really awesome. Another real benefit of the Jackbox games is that it allows everybody to play on their phone and you really only need one computer or one device that is running the Jackbox game and it basically gives the instructions where everyone goes on their phone, they log into jackbox.tv, they enter a room code, and then basically the game will send prompts to everyone's phones and then they get to play these different games with a very large group. So my favorite of the Jackbox Party Packs, because there are so many of them, is Jackbox Party Pack 5. And so I thought that I would just kind of break down what games are included in Party Pack 5

and to also give you a little bit of a flavor or an idea of what these packs are like. So if you are familiar with the You Don't Know Jack brand, that's actually the same people who make these games. So maybe if you were a kid, you might remember where they would have like those little trivia cards that were connected with like a ring, and you could read trivia questions to your friends. And this basically kind of grew out of that so in party pack 5 one of the game modes is called you don't know jack and it's basically just like those old trivia cards it basically will read out trivia everybody on their phone has to put in the answer and it just keeps track of the score it's incredibly straightforward very vanilla probably the weakest thing that's in party pack 5 but it does give you just a straight up

trivia so if you're playing with a group of people that just really aren't into gaming or too much creativity then maybe just trivia is the way to go But one bummer about this mode is that it's really just kind of like everyone doing their own trivia game, and then it just kind of keeps track of the score. There's not really any interaction. So out of all the installments here in Party Pack 5, this one's my least favorite. All right, let's jump into Split the Room. This is one that's a really clever party game. Basically what it does is it will give you a prompt where you have to fill in the blank and your goal is to try to fill in that

blank so that way when it asks everybody in the room, your goal is to split the room where you get an equal number of votes on both sides. So for example, you might read a prompt like, you are about to have your first child. As part of the new initiative, blank offers to pay for everything, food, clothes, and schooling, if they can sponsor your child. That means that she will wear subtly branded clothes until she's 18. Do you take the money? And so maybe for that blank, maybe you put in like McDonald's or Fortnite or, you know, whatever it might be. And so if you are able to effectively split the room, then you get more points. So that one can really be a lot of fun. I have found out that it leads to a lot of silly arguments in your group, which is really a blast. We've had many times where we have just

laughed and argued for minutes on end as a result of playing Split the Room. The next one up is Madverse City, and this is actually my favorite one of the bunch. And so this basically takes the whole concept of a rap battle and it has you battle someone else that's in the group so the game will randomly match you up against someone else and it starts out very similar to like a mad lib it'll ask you for something like um you know what's a negative adjective and so you'll plug that in and then basically what it does is it will fill in the first sentence of a rap battle. And then your goal is to keep like the same rhyme scheme and to come up with a second line that will rhyme with it. And then you do this basically twice.

So you get like a four line rap battle and then it'll match you up against someone else. It'll play your rap lines, which are read out loud by a robot and then it reads the other person's and then everyone in the group gets to vote for whoever had the best rap battle uh so like i just looked up an example on google image and one of the ones that i saw submitted was kind of funny so the mad lib must have been something like you know what's something expensive that you wouldn't want to break and so so they put in vase. So the first line that they got was, your face is so ugly, you broke my vase. And so the second line they came up with was, good thing it's a pandemic, so you can mask your face. And so this is like what you're doing. It's very simple.

It's not as hard as it might sound. I know sometimes if you tell people it's going to be a rap battle game, they kind of start to shut down and they're like, well, I can't rap. It's very simple. You just come up with a very silly two-line insult and then you're just off to the races from there. The next one here is called Patently Stupid and this is a drawing game. They tend to include at least one of these in every party pack but basically the game will prompt everyone by giving you a bizarre problem and then you have to draw an invention on like a little virtual napkin so like there's like a silly example the game gives you something about how like the toilet paper is always out and so they kind of sketch

like a little drone that can attach to a toilet paper roll and so it's like a toilet paper delivery service all right so that's just like a really stupid in-game example but then what you do is you have to give it a name you have to give it a tagline and then it lets everyone present your invention one at a time and then everyone else gets to vote on what their favorite drawings were for their little patented device to take care of this crazy problem so like when i did a google image search one of the prompts was i'm always losing my children and so someone just invented the child leash. And it's just like a really silly picture of a parent with a giant smile. And then the child is on all fours being dragged by a leash

with a giant, you know, sad face. So it's just very silly. And it gives you a chance to try to like seriously present why this is a good invention to your friends. And so it always ends up leading to a lot of laughing. The last game that's included in Party Pack 5 is Zeeple Dome. And this one's kind of strange because it's not like any of the other games. Normally with Jackbox, it either includes answering trivia questions or filling out prompts of a certain kind. This one plays more like a Mario Party minigame. Basically, it shows on the screen where your character is, and then you can basically click and drag on your phone, and it shows a little line.

So you can kind of like aim, and it shows how much power, and then you let go, and then it'll basically like, you know, try to collect things or to hit another character. And so this one's more of like an action battle game, And then it'll basically try to collect things or to hit another character. And so this one's more of an action battle game. But it's not done terribly well. So in our groups, we have really not used that one very much at all. I would say 90% of the time that we're playing Party Pack 5, we are doing Split the Room, Patently Stupid, or Madverse City.

These Jackbox Party Packs do go on sale all the time in steam so i would not necessarily pay full price but they do tend to drop down to seven eight twelve dollars i'll see every once in a while but this is a really good entry point for the jackbox games and one of the neat things is you can also play virtually. So I know during the pandemic, we would have our friends join up on Zoom, and we would have just one person share their screen. And then we were all able to join and even play remotely. Even famously, one time, Todd told me he was playing Jackbox with his family in North Carolina. I said, oh, what's your room code? And so I actually popped in and I was playing from home in Arizona. And Todd's mom thought that was the coolest,

craziest thing she had ever seen with technology that I could play with them, even though I was 3000 miles away. So anyway, I might talk to you guys about some of the other party packs, but Five is a really, really solid option. And I hope that you guys will have a chance to party packs but five is a really really solid option and i hope that you guys will have a chance to pick it up and play it with some friends it can be enormous fun and we oh we actually did a little bit with a community night on our discord

server so some of you out there may have even played a little bit with me and josh where we have hosted these in the past all right well that's it here for today. We'll see you guys next time.