Preview: Jackbox Party Pack 11 might be the best in the series yet

I love a Jackbox Party Pack, and I’ve been playing them since the very beginning. There have been some bangers, some misses, and some a mixture of both — but after playing Jackbox Party Pack 11 for a few hours last week, I have a feeling this one is going to be all banger. I can’t wait to play more, and this might just be the best Jackbox game we’ve seen in several years.

As always, Jackbox Party Pack 11 is made up of five games played by signing into a Jackbox server on your mobile phone. With the full line-up revealed last week, there’s a great mix of game types, with something to suit pretty much every taste. If you like drawing games, you’ll enjoy decorating biscuits in Cookie Haus. If you want an excuse to screech strange noises into your phone, Hear Say is the one for you (not to be confused with the 2001 Popstars winners). There’s also a trivia RPG, a crime investigation game that requires you to put your fellow players on the spot, and Doominate, which allows your inner comedian to go absolutely wild.

If you’ve played a Jackbox game before, you’ll know that these are games best played with people you know well — for me, that means my closest friends who I’m not afraid to be totally unhinged with. But even playing with a group of fellow games critics and journalists, some of whom I’d never met before, I was able to have a riot with just about every game.

Let’s start with perhaps the weakest of the bunch first, which for me was Suspectives. This is a game that needs a large group to get the most out of, and you need the confidence to talk directly to your fellow players, asking clever questions and gauging people’s answers. You see, when you start playing, one player will be positioned as the culprit of a silly crime mapped out on screen. Everyone will answer a series of random questions and, by interrogating players about their answers, you’ll need to try and work out the culprit.

Your mileage with the game will depend on who you’re playing with and how everyone decides to play the game. Even though I was deemed innocent by the game, I decided to be obtuse with my answers, leaving my fellow players suspicious of me. Other players answered honestly and straight. There’s certainly fun to be had, but the more introverted amongst us may prefer the games that are more phone-based.

Hear Say is another game that more introverted players may struggle with, but it is a huge amount of fun. You’ll be asked to record custom sound effects by using your phone’s microphone. You’ll be given certain prompts, like shouting out your favourite dessert or whispering a conspiracy, then players will need to vote for their favourites. With recordings being slightly warped, and you being given a funny little on-screen cartoon character who is animated to match your words, the results are often hilarious. Even more so when soundbites are taken and used as sound effects for a short FMV.

While Legends of Trivia is still currently heavily in development, our brief look at this game shows a lot of promise, too. It’s the game I’m perhaps most excited for: I love a quiz game, and presenting the format as a RPG works surprisingly well. The unusual thing here is that you won’t be going head-to-head with your fellow players; you’ll need to work together. You see, every correct answer forms an attack on an enemy, so it’s in everyone’s best interests to get as many correct answers as possible. Sometimes, all players will get the same questions, but at other times you’ll need to work together to match prompts on each of your phones to find the correct answer.

In what I think may be a first for a Jackbox game, Cookie Haus is described as “cosy”. This drawing game will have you decorating cookies with piping and sprinkles to match various bizarre prompts. Sure, you could get pretty lewd with your drawings, I suppose, but the act of decorating is pretty wholesome. According to game director Chase McClure, the drawing interface has been “built from the ground up to feel very physical”. It certainly feels more responsive than Drawful, and getting to add other elements like different types of sprinkles means you don’t need to be a master artisté to be able to enjoy it.

And I’ve saved the best until last. I had so much fun playing Doominate, a game that gives you a wholesome idea that you then need to ruin. Players will be asked to input some things they enjoy, and then everyone else needs to ruin those ideas. For example, a prompt led me to input “reading in bed” as a pastime I enjoy. This was ruined by a fellow player to become “reading in bed with your parents when you’re over 30”. Brilliant.

If you like to laugh, Doominate is likely to be the game you’ll gravitate to again and again, and since a game will only take around 20 minutes, you’ll probably want to play it multiple times in one sitting. It has similar vibes to the likes of Fibbage and Quiplash, with players voting for the best (read as: funniest) answers from competitors.

So, the good news is that Jackbox Party Pack 11 is going to be an absolute treat for those of you who love to play fun party games with your friends. The bad news is that it doesn’t have a firm release date yet beyond ‘autumn’. Still, that’s not far away, so make sure this is on your radar. If you’re typically a fan of Jackbox Games’ zany brand of party games, you are not going to be disappointed.

Jackbox Party Pack 11 is launching on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC, Apple TV and iPad, Amazon Fire TV and Luna. Phew.