Jackbox has become known for producing packs of quirky minigames designed to be played by groups of friends who love to add swears to them. Rambling presentations, bad art skills, and off-key rapping have been the order of the day. Until recently.
The first pack to deviate from the regular Party Pack system wasJackbox Naughty Pack, which forces filth from the start. Now this follow up has pivoted again with The Jackbox Survey Scramble, comprising a small selection of games based on surveys.
I had the chance to play two of the new creations, Hilo and Squares. Both take very different approaches to using survey data to create a new kind of game. Hilo simply requires you to guess the most popular survey answers, followed by the least. It’s like a mixture of Family Feud and Pointless, as you attempt to switch your guesses from one extreme to the other.
In contrast, Squares takes a further unique approach by requiring you to guess answers within a specific number range. Each represents a square in a three by three table, and if you guess an answer higher up the range than the one currently in the square you’re able to steal it, creating a unique Tic Tac Toe experience where teams have to be precise to make a line of guesses.
Hilo is a great starter as it has a generous timer and there are a lot of answers to guess, making it easier to at least hit the board. After you’ve chosen your topic from a list of three, there are a large number of answers to choose – over 150, to be precise. At first, you get more points the closer your answer is to the top, but this is quickly swapped to awarding more points for those hitting the bottom. The gear switch makes this a little more interesting than just playing which answer is better, and it’s more challenging than I expected.
A US-Centric Content filter also ensures those of us on the other side of the pond don’t have to remember what Americans call rubbish, lifts, or car boots. When trying to think of an answer quickly this is a setting you’ll want to take advantage of. It won’t help your spelling or typos, but at least you’ll be aiming at the correct answer, rather than trying to play translator.
Once you have the hang of things, Squares will get a lot more competitive very quickly, as you begin to steal squares in this Tic Tac Toe variation. The prompts for this are more guessable, and the answer range is smaller, hitting around 100 answers maximum, rather than closer to 200. This feels more fast-paced, despite still not having a strict time limit.
The pace is mostly down to the prompts, as they are normally simple and easy to guess, yet frustrating to master. When naming ‘items you have more than a dozen of at home’ there were a surprisingly large number of things to consider. Is cup more popular than plate? Is eggs an answer? And if we all believe we have more than a dozen teaspoons in our houses, where the heck are they all?
If you are easily distracted you will start to ask yourself similar very random questions, which can affect performance. Or at least that’s my excuse for losing to my kids.
The prompts so far, especially for Hilo, seem to be quite a wide range of easy to guess, sensible questions, more thought provoking prompts and of course some truly bizarre ideas. Categories such as ‘sandwich ingredients’ or ‘blue things’ are very easy to guess, while prompts like ‘things which should be illegal but aren’t’ pose far more of a challenge, especially if you have to consider the answers at the bottom of a long list. Then, of course, there are also some more classic Jackbox suggestions like ‘pooping backup locations’ and ‘things which fit in your nostril’ where all bets are off. One word answers narrow things down, making it less impossible to actually guess, but there’s still plenty of room for weirdness.
I found that it took a couple of rounds to get my head around what kind of answers came up for some prompts. For example, when trying to guess ‘things which should be illegal but aren’t’ my brain went immediately to stupid things like marmite and smelly feet, while the survey topped out with very serious answers like cheating and bullying.
There is a note in the game suggesting that you can put two words together, such as nosepicking, so I expect this may get out of hand quite quickly.
Categories for both games appear to span the same kind of ideas, but at this early point it’s difficult to tell if the prompts are unique to each game or if all games draw from the same huge database and just eliminate those which don’t work as well for that format. Regardless, it doesn’t actually matter since the real joy in this game is likely held in its future.
Currently, the data is drawn from surveys conducted in advance, but the real key to Survey Scramble will be unlocked over time. As you fill in your guess, the survey results are expanded, with these new guesses being added into the database, or so the game tells me. They don’t add in typos, but swears appear to be fair game. This twist means that the game should constantly evolve as more players enter the fold. The results of this will be interesting to see.
Presumably there is some kind of limit, so we don’t end up with 500 answers to guess from, but what is this, and most importantly, can we use this to our advantage? Will people start petitioning to get their favourite answers added to the results by encouraging others to use them? Will they not need to? Will we discover that it is truly universal that every question in Jackbox is answered with a three letter word that starts with c?
Those put off by the thought of the experience being hijacked by lewd prompts need not worry either. The game does allow you to filter out the crude content with a family-friendly setting, as well as three profanity filters. The profanity settings remove ‘words used in hateful speech’, and ‘profanity’, just the hateful words, or neither. This means your experience can be adjusted easily to suit the players.
The real fun of this pack will no doubt build over time, as we essentially become part of the game ourselves. If you’ve ever wondered what an NSFW version of Family Feud would look like this is likely the closest we’ll get, as the community’s notorious propensity for lewdness creeps into the formula.
So now, all those not taking advantage of the content control settings will no longer have to wonder why a select few words commonly used in Jackbox games weren’t an answer for ‘embarrassing things to do in an elevator’… You’re welcome.
