Given that my family and I have played pretty well everything that the folks at Jackbox have put out in this generation, we’ve seen some ups and downs. There are some games like Quiplash, Fibbage, and Trivia Murder Party that we love and keep coming back to, and then others that we tried out and are just fine never revisiting. The thing is, that’s no doubt part of what makes the game design strong overall when they typically include a few very different games in the same pack, with the hopes that at least one will always connect with everyone.

For people who share that familiarity with everything Jackbox, the most notable thing here is that Survey Scramble simply feels like its own animal overall. Sure, you’ll still be using your phones, you’ll be trying to compete for the highest score, and there can be some lively discussion going on throughout, but the nature of each of these games being tied to the accumulated survey data they have for some very odd prompts, something they themselves couldn’t possibly control, makes it interesting. If nothing else, since it seems that the answers are being recompiled with some regularity, the inherent chance that new answers will continue to arrive, or that the most popular ones can possibly change, also gives it a little more unpredictability.

Going through the individual games, I think Hilo was our favorite, just for the Family Feud-like way it plays out, with everyone trying to guess the top answers and then even the bottom ones at some point. Seeing what weird things people have come up with, or which answers they can surprisingly prefer, is a great source of fun, and here the rules are easy to understand. In the case of Speed, we found it to be pretty wild but also quite exhausting, with the goal being to come up with as many popular answers as you can. As this continued to go to new rounds with higher score multipliers, it just started to feel like too much and we were completely out of ideas. Not a bad concept, but perhaps it runs a round or two past its sweet spot.

Squares moves the game over to being team-based, with the goal being to find ranked answers to a prompt that fit specific ranges, corresponding to specific squares. The ones with larger ranges can then get pretty contentious as people try to come up with the best answer in that specific range. It can feel pretty random at times where things rank, so there’s definitely an element of luck, but it wasn’t too bad. Finally, there’s Bounce, which is at least a creative implementation where you’re in teams and each squad is controlling a bar to play a game much like Breakout (or Arkanoid for you younger gamers), each team taking a turn between hits and moving their paddle based on where answers they provide to a prompt happen to be in a general range. As you might guess, this can get to be tough pretty quickly, and in general it felt like this was the family’s least favorite in the bunch.

All told, I commend the Jackbox team for coming at multiplayer party games from a new angle, while still retaining a pretty solid quality of play by sticking with the format they’ve pretty well perfected at this point. The ranking-based games are at least quite different, and the evolving nature of the answer pool will be intriguing to watch to some degree. Still, when put up against the majority of their other packs, this feels more like an amateur effort overall.