While not exactly being a board game, Jackbox Party Pack 2 definitely fills a number of criteria that pretty much makes it the same thing since you need to have a group of people in one place to actually get the most fun out of the experience.
With that said, Jackbox Party Pack 2 doesn’t actually have any physical parts to hold on to since it’s a videogame. But that doesn’t stop it from being one of the best party games that I’ve ever seen people play. Now, while thus far I’ve been referring to this edition of Jackbox in a singular form when it’s actually multiple games contained under a single umbrella.
The unique draw of all the games in Jackbox is their highly interactive nature. While you’ll have to do a bit of wire connecting to hook your computer up to your television to start off, once you have that you’ll notice that all the games will have you all using your phones, an object usually used to isolate yourself from others, to actually play all the games making it extremely easy to just learn any of the games and hop in and out of them.
My personal favorite of the five is Fibbage, a 2-8 player trivia game that has you guessing for correct answers while throwing off the other players with fake answers and I’m sure you can imagine the chaos with up to 7 other players and the game trying to trick you. While this game starts off with people actually trying to win, by the end of the night, and this is where the fun really starts the game, just descends into people trying to get the most laughs with their fake answers.
A close second to Fibbage is Bidiots, a drawing-based game of 3 to 6 players that has you bidding against one another over the ownership of pieces of magnificent art that you are asked to all draw before the game starts. The catch is none of you really knows what all the pieces are worth so it’s all very cloak and dagger. Much like Fibbage, the fun starts when people stop taking it seriously and start getting really creative with the drawing, but that’s entirely depending on how creative your group of friends really are.
Those two games alone are enough to sell the game in my opinion, but on top of that you’ve got three more games. Bomb Corp, a four player game that has you cooperatively diffusing bombs with each player only being given part of the instructions. Earwax, a game based entirely around creating funny sound bites. Lastly, Quiplash a kind of digital version of ‘Cards Against Humanity’ that has you coming up with creative answers to fill in the blanks of prompts and then voting for the best one.
At the end though, I can’t overstate the amount of fun that is to be had here. With a price tag of only 70 SR and that’s when it’s not on sale, you can grab this bunch of games off steam and have an epic time getting creative and learning how terrible your friends really are.