Having always been a fan of the Jackbox Party Packs, my family is typically eager to see what new wackiness is in store for them with each new release. This 10th Party Pack was a bit of a shock, with some good and some bad, as it feels like the more diverse set of games put together to date spanning many different areas of focus and styles of play, and additionally only leveraging one game from a previous pack with the rest being originals.

Starting with the positives you have Tee K.O. 2 showing up to lay down a bit of a security blanket with smart play mixing drawing with some creative mixing and matching to see who can take random images and phrases from everyone else and make something cool. While the formula has been refined a little it remains an enjoyable diversion as long as people don’t mind making typically terrible line art pictures. The next popular game is Fixy Text, where people will work to undermine someone by adding to their texts to another person. From a technical standpoint we sometimes had issues with moving the cursor while someone else was texting and then getting whatever we wanted to type to register, but on the whole it was creative and pretty trolly fun. The most popular game in the pack though was Dodo Re Mi, which plays out a bit like Guitar Hero with everyone trying to keep up with playing the notes for different parts in a variety of tunes. If you choose something with a higher difficulty be ready to get a bit overwhelmed, and it did feel like when things got intense the somewhat small area for hitting the notes in each line were a bit smaller than they could or should be.

Closing out the pack first you have Time Jinx, which really is just a varied trivia game where the focus is purely on identifying the year that specific events (both of historical import and just plain random nonsense) occurred. With the right crowd perhaps this could work out, but for us more often than not it felt like a matter of who was luckier at guessing. Finally, there’s Hypnotorious which took a round or so to really understand and was the least favorite of the bunch. Each person is given an identity which they’re supposed to hint at when asked a variety of questions. People then see what everyone says and try to group themselves with other identities that feel similar. Perhaps with more people, like the full 8, this would work better but with 4 it felt too easy to choose the odd person out.

On the whole I think it’s more inevitable that people will have good and bad reactions across the 5 games in this pack then normal, mainly because they’re all so different. While that can be a strength, sort of carving out an opportunity for everyone to have something they’re a bit better at, it also makes them collectively feel a bit hit or miss as a package. I’d love to see Dodo Re Mi return in the future, as well as perhaps more Tee K.O. but I’d say the rest are more middling to low on the scale against past game types.