(Image: Jackbox Games) Each member of the gamer team focuses on a game they loved this year plus our main Game of the Year awards 2021. Our main awards will be postponed for the rest of the month. There is a game in the Jackbox Party Pack 8 about drawing weapons. No, this isn’t Drawful, because you’re not guessing what the other weapons are. Your artwork was in Weapons Drawn and is a smokescreen for a murder mystery. Hidden in each murder weapon drawing is a letter (callcard, if you can) from the name of the artist, and identifying it is the most direct way to know whodunnit. You also name the party guests that are targeted for murder, no matter what you want. “Pipplebuff Crumblebottom” or “George Pleasedontkillmeton”. During our last game of Weapons Drawn over Thanksgiving, I needed to draw a sword and look for a way to hide my “M” from this story. I’m going to try to make the sword hilt through a spiked consonant. The disguise worked for all six seconds before the friends noticed the suspicious form in retrospect. If you keep track of the facts, Weapons Drawn is the one part of art game, one part hidden identity, and one part creative writing. I’ve never played as much of that, and because you consider there have been 40 (5) people now in total. Jackbox games are in play. When you’d think that our group would have gotten sick of punching room codes and drawing obscure prompts, the same thing is called Jackbox, which helps surprise us every year. I think that Jackbox is very good at borrowing ideas from its own games to create new ones. Weapons Drawn, for example, is a murderic twist of it and Fakin’ it. The Wheel of enormous proportions, the most casual game in the pack, has the same trivia format as Trivia Murder Party and the same randomization as the wheel spin. Drawful Art is good it isn’t just more Drawful, but now you can draw a few frames to tell a story. One of my favorite remixes in the partypack is Job. This one allows players to answer the benign prompt with up to one thousand words. Players then have to answer an additional prompt, but only a few words of the previous answers can be used for their answers. The results often sound like those autocorrect challenges that are grammatically correct and never make sense. I don’t eat tacos because why even bother with forks and spoons on Wednesdays? I promise that it worked out right now since you needed to be there. The group votes on the classic Quiplash answers. I’ve always loved that you could go serious or funny in games like this, and the addition to the complexity of just restricting word choice makes both the options more difficult. The biggest triumph of Party Pack 8 is Poll Mine, which is essentially Family Feud, in terms of the team and the survey. It’s team-based, which is apparently a first for a Jackbox game. Teams spend a few minutes answering a survey (something simple like ranking Pringles flavours or greeting forms), then assume which answers the minimum or most popular group has. I didn’t expect to like this, since regular Family Feud is sort of bad, but this variation is genius. Instead of a random population survey that doesn’t include answers inconsistent, you’re able to take your own responses as a baseline and delve into your friends’ minds to take care of answers. Do you ask for your answer, so that you don’t share the benefits? If Poll Mine sounds fun, I’ve written some more detailed about it here. It was an excellent year for Jackbox. Most packs have something, but one or two stinker games which we rarely go back to, but Party Pack 8 is simply bangers. If you haven’t already played the full 1,000 rounds of Drawful, that means doing nothing of animation or so on. Just don’t make this your very first Jackbox The a little complicated rules of Weapons Drawn and Poll Mine are quite confusing for beginners.
