This week marks the launch of the Jackbox Naughty Pack, a new addition to the long-running series of party games that feels inevitable, as it fully leans into all the sex jokes you and your friends were already making in past Jackbox releases. To celebrate the pack’s launch, Steam is having a massive sale on the rest of the series, which includes all ten previously released packs as well as some standalone stars. It’s an absolute bargain of a deal that lets you pick and choose from a wide selection of fantastic minigames tailor made to make any party more fun.
I love having people over to my apartment for everything from casual movie-and-popcorn to more elaborate dinner parties, but what every party at my apartment has in common is that it ends with Jackbox. That’s because in the late hours of the night, with a few drinks in everybody, there isn’t anything quite as fun as gathering around the TV and cracking stupid jokes facilitated via the series’ hilarious collection of minigames. Much of that comes down to the Jackbox Party Pack’s ease of use.
For the uninitiated, Jackbox utilizes the most common device in existence today—our phones. While one person is required to own each pack on a console or PC, which is how you host games, the other players connect and play through their phones. It’s remarkably simple, and makes the mess of collecting enough controllers for a game of Mario Party or a match of Halo a non-issue. The time between someone suggesting that we start a game of Jackbox and actually playing a game is miniscule. And the variety of games on offer means that you never get bored.
With the release of the Naughty Pack, there are now 11 collections of minigames available for Jackbox. What each minigame has in common is the use of player input, by which I mean that they all revolve around players typing in words, drawing cartoons, or voting in polls to decide the winner. Because of this, every round of a given game is unique, playing up the inside jokes and particular interests of the people playing. For example, Fibbage—perhaps the quintessential Jackbox game—lets every player input a fake answer to a trivia prompt in the hopes of fooling their opponents. And sure, playing it that way can be fun, but it’s more fun to just turn these prompts into big jokes and vote on what is funniest. Playing to the group gets even more fun in Fibbage: Enough About You, which explicitly turns the game into a joke about the people playing.
If all of that sounds like the perfect recipe for a great party night you’d be right, and you’d be a fool to miss out on the current Steam sale, which ends on September 19. Every party pack is discounted, with some up to fifty percent off. If you just want to buy the whole package, it can be yours for $US116.92, which might sound like a lot but is much lower than the usual $US279.90 price tag. Trust me, it’s worth it for the hours of fun you and your friends will have.
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