If you’ve ever played a Jackbox game before, then you know how quickly it can descend into absolute anarchy. The developer has a long and storied history of pumping out party games that lend themselves almost too well to rooting out the most morally degenerate members of your friend group by allowing them to say the most rude, sexual, and out of pocket things possible.
This is a big part of the appeal for many players, and with the Jackbox Naughty Pack, the company is taking that note from players and running with it, offering three adult-themed games in one pack. But where the other games have spent the last decade bringing those themes about so naturally (well, depending on how nasty your friends are) having the Naughty Pack all but force you to be explicit meant this iteration lacked the others’ deft touch.
I tried out the Jackbox Naughty Pack with a mixed group: some were Jackbox veterans like me, having played most of the entries in the last ten years, while others were complete newcomers to the games. Fueled by pizza and hard seltzers, we launched the first game in the pack, Dirty Drawful when we felt ourselves amply prepared for the shenanigans Jackbox games usually bring up when we.
Dirty Drawful: More Colors, More Filth
My Favorite Game In The Naughty Pack
Drawful provides players with a prompt and requires them to draw, to the very best of their ability on a phone screen and with limited colors, a fairly detailed picture. Other players have to guess what you just drew for them, then everyone’s answers are displayed on screen along with your actual prompt. You get points for every player who guesses the correct prompt, while other players get points for fooling friends into choosing their fake answers. Dirty Drawful works exactly the same, just with a lot more dong jokes.
This was the game we enjoyed the most from the selection, since we have Drawful on rotation in our regular game nights. I had to draw “en route in my drivable vibrator” and learned that alotof my friends know what a Hitachi looks like, while my boyfriend was made to draw, “Sir please get your genitals out of the pool jets”. That should give you an idea of the prompts to expect.
Some of the best fun we had with Dirty Drawful was absolutely spamming the eight emotes they allow you to use once you’re finished with your own artwork, even though they tend to block out the actual drawing on the screen.
Let Me Finish: Moaning To Make Your Case
Let Me Finish, a kind of game we haven’t seen before, came next. Everyone in the group is shown a photo, then two players must consider a prompt and argue which part of the photo best embodies it. When everyone is done bickering, the other players vote on whose suggestion they feel is most correct, and the player who convinced the most people to their silly side of things wins.
Some of the most fun you can have with Jackbox games is when people need to present an idea to the class (think Patently Stupid, but more directly competitive), but Let Me Finish fell a little short. In our round, two players were given a photo of a group of different birds and were asked to choose which of them uses the most lube.
It’s a fun idea on the surface, but it became one-note very quickly. Having to be sexually explicit felt really forced here, with the host purring into the mic with sex joke after sex joke after sex joke. Even for the Naughty Pack, it felt a little heavy-handed for us, and we moved on after only one round.
Fakin' It: Push The Button, But Make It Saucy
Finally, Fakin’ It is all about sniffing out the imposter in your group, and it plays somewhat like Push the Button from Jackbox Party Pack 6. Depending on the size of your party, there will be one or two ‘fakers’ in the group, who you’ll need to expose after seeing a series of prompts on-screen. Everyone receives a prompt on their phone, with the faker(s) receiving a different and far more general prompt, and anyone suspicious must defend their choice. The faker is only identified if the majority of players vote for them. The fakers win if they remain undetected, the real players win if they sus out the snakes.
Needing the majority vote makes it surprisingly easy to get away with lying. Prompts included things like raising your hand if you’d sleep with a ghost, choosing which holiday mascot you’d take home with you if you had to pick one, and selecting an emoji to represent what you’d like a sugar daddy to buy for you. Being able to physically see your friends is critical for this game, but Jackbox also offers a different iteration for folks playing online that makes gameplay when you’re not in the same room more of a breeze.
In all, every group of friends will have their favorite games in the Jackbox Naughty Pack, like all the other Jackbox packs. We probably won’t go back to Let Me Finish, but Fakin’ It and Dirty Drawful both got lots of belly laughs. Some of the people in our group were meeting for the first time, and nothing bonds new friends together quite like having to justify why you picked a trumpet emoji when Fakin’ It asks about your sex life. The game will go over well with some folks, and I did enjoy my time with it, but if you’re friends with people who already find ways to makeeveryJackbox pack into a ‘naughty’ pack, then being forced to do so may sometimes feel a little constricting.
The Jackbox Naughty Pack
WHERE TO PLAY
Bring the heat with a threesome of fun in Jackbox Naughty Pack. Find out who’s the best liar in Fakin’ It All Night Long, illustrate spicy prompts in Dirty Drawful, and answer questions like “How does this avocado get aroused?” in Let Me Finish.
