The ninth iteration of Jackbox Games’ Jackbox Party Pack series launched on Oct. 20, and it’s already taken over living rooms around the world. Like the eight previous titles in the series, Jackbox Party Pack 9 includes party games that gamers and non-gamers alike will enjoy. Each game is easy to pick up and play, and players participate on their phones rather than by using controllers, which cuts down on input confusion for those who don’t normally play games.
While each Party Pack title has five games to try, not all of them are created equal. There are generally one or two games in each pack that are standout experiences; there are also usually one or two games that are stinkers. If you’re wondering which games are worth playing in Party Pack 9, you’ve come to the right place: we stress-tested each one with a group of friends who are seasoned Jackbox players and fans.
Here are all five Party Pack 9 games, ranked.
5) Quixort
Almost all Party Pack titles have some sort of trivia game. Quixort is Party Pack 9’s iteration: After splitting into teams, players receive a prompt that involves sorting names or phrases into a particular order. Some of the prompts we received included “Lady Gaga songs from oldest to most recent” and “Celebrity chefs from oldest to youngest.” With the prompt at the top of the screen, each player on a team takes turns arranging a falling block into the correct order. It’s like Tetris mixed with trivia.
The problem with Quixort is that we had to figure this all out ourselves. There is very little introduction to the game and almost no instructions are given, so it might take you a few tries to get it right. Some of the block movements are also finicky, and in later rounds, it can be difficult to tell what order is denoted by blocks that are stacked on top of each other. There’s also nothing for the team that isn’t currently participating to do while another team is building its timeline. Quixort just doesn’t have the sparkle of many other Party Pack trivia games, especially when compared to standouts like Party Pack 8’s The Wheel of Enormous Proportions.
4) Roomerang
If you’ve seen the TV show Big Brother, you’ll know the central concept of Roomerang. Players are assigned identities before competing in a variety of challenges, including writing notes to other players’ moms and other silly activities. At the end of each round, someone is voted out of the house by players. But don’t worry, if you’re voted out, you’re able to keep playing normally through a new identity. The player who wins each round receives a special perk, like immunity from being voted out or a vote that counts double.
While Roomerang is an interesting conceit and the melodramatic host is fun, the game sputters out in practice. Most of the activities aren’t very engaging, making the subsequent vote at the end of each round feel arbitrary. The identities players enter at the beginning don’t have much of an impact on the course of the game. Most Party Pack titles have a game that works better with a large group of people, and Roomerang falls in that category: it feels as though it would be a lot more interesting with eight or nine people rather than the group of five we played it with.
3) Fibbage 4
Fibbage 4 is Party Pack 9’s free-entry game. Following in the footsteps of popular games like Quiplash, Fibbage 4 adds new scenarios, video entries, and questions submitted by Jackbox fans to the formula, which has players attempting to fake out their friends by writing ridiculous answers to ridiculous questions. We encountered one of the new video entries during our playthrough, and it added an interesting dimension to the normally static interface of Jackbox free-entry games.
How fun Fibbage 4 is ultimately comes down to how inventive your friends are. We had a blast trying to pick out the truth from everyone’s lies, but if your Party Pack companions aren’t used to the sort of humorous thinking that free-entry games require, you might get less mileage out of this one. We also encountered some problems with the game’s auto-detection, which should catch when you input an answer that’s the same as the truth: we played one round that included duplicate answers because the player-submitted fib wasn’t written quite the same way as the truth. If you’re looking for something easy and low-stress to drop into and drop out of, Fibbage is the game for you.
2) Nonsensory
If you’ve played Poll Mine in Party Pack 8, you’ll have an idea of how Nonsensory works. Each player answers a question with a numeric slider or a drawing, and then other players must guess what they were trying to interpret or display on their own slider. It’s hard to explain, and it takes a few rounds to get right, but it makes sense and flows well once you’ve got it under your fingers.
Jackbox drawing games are frequently some of the game’s best thanks to the silliness of most players’ mediocre drawing skills and the words they write to compensate. Nonsensory is a great game to play if you think you know your friends well: understanding how they would interpret a question or draw a response will help you quite a bit. The questions are weird and wacky, the scales are fun, and the game is forgiving enough that even if you don’t guess perfectly, you still have an opportunity to win.
1) Junktopia
We weren’t expecting Junktopia to be the best game in Party Pack 9. We generally steer away from games like Talking Points in Party Pack 7 that require you to pitch an idea or convince your fellow players to support you to win—they just take too much effort and we’re lazy. Despite this, Junktopia caught our attention thanks to its wild conceit, which has you buying junk from an antique store, creating a story behind it, and trying to resell it for a profit.
While Junktopia suffers from some of the same problems as Fibbage 4—if your friends aren’t funny or hate public speaking, this game isn’t going to go over well with them—it’s easier to craft inventive responses thanks to the truly strange items the game lets you buy and write about. When combined with a surprisingly long run time that gives you a chance to recover if you make a mistake, a charming art style, and a great explanation of the rules before you dive in, it’s clear that Junktopia is the winner of Party Pack 9.
