Jackbox Party Pack 8's best game is a genius twist on Family Feud

Jackbox Company Pack 8's best game is a genius twirl on Family Feud

(Figure of speech credit: Jackbox Games)

Firing upwardly a new Jackbox Party Bundle off has been a each year tradition for my admirer group since the series first began. We love the insect bite-shrew-sized social games to death, but we've also been playing them long enough to know apiece clique unremarkably has one or two prima games and three that are just OK. Trying KO'd Jackbox Party Pack 8 with friends the other night, we totally united that this twelvemonth's standout is a team-based variation of Family Feud called The Public opinion poll Mine.

We were a bit surprised that the first step of The Poll Mine was to divide the room. Jackbox games are unremarkably cooperative or free-for-all, but here we were submitting team names to vote out happening and choosing little critter avatars. The game's premise is that both teams are lost in a mine and competitory to line up torches (points) to light their way out. Aft a heated election, we began an ultimate showdown betwixt two super mature team names, The Murderers vs. The Sex Havers (croak team!).

The Poll Mine starts aside giving everyone a short survey on your phone. Our first round was a multiple choice prompt that asked which role in a post-apocalyptic high school scenario fits us best (the tech wizard, the big beefy friend, the teacher that dies immediately, etc). You get a minute Beaver State cardinal to rank your top answers one through five, the game collects the data, and then onto the play phase.

We were past presented with a way full of labelled doors matching our survey answers and took turns opening single at a clock time. The destination of our first round was, in true Kinsfolk Feud style, to open them in order of most popular to least popular answers. Demur, unlike FamFeud, we couldn't generalize about a pool of hundreds of answers. We had to magistrate based happening our Friend's personalities and senses of humor. Jackbox is stylish to give teams a minute or so to talk it over earlier locking in a door, because it gave team Sex time to discourse how we surveyed individually and start to piece together the overall rankings.

the poll mine jackbox — (Image credit: Jackbox Games)

Talk specifics paid slay in the brief term, but it backfired erstwhile the baton passed to team Murderers. Those jerks with ears heard everything we said and used IT to subtly judge against their own results and open the right doors without bountiful us any extra hints.

I suppose information technology'd be possible to visit a rule against hearing in (playing concluded Discord, we could have muted each other between turns), but I think keeping conversations nonunion makes Poll Mine more entertaining. Not only do you have to navigate around specifics, but it's very funny to watch the other team up doubtfulness themselves, misremember inside information, and scramble to lock in a door before the buzzer.

Going into the closing labialize, things weren't looking good for team Sex. The Murderers had four torches and we had uncomparable. Our finale was a survey with eight answers and a new wrinkle: rank answers from least to most touristed, and if you get one wrong, fall back a torch.

Finishing with the most torches felt like a elongate shooting at this item—immediately we antitrust wanted to go with the one torch we had left. The prompt was something along the lines of "If you were a celebrity, which of these are reasons you'd be considered attractive" with answers like "Just Rather Hot", "Hot Vampire (TV)", "Acting Guitar", and "Really Talented". This one really threw ME for a loop because it was hard to pinpoint which friends were answering ironically (like Maine) and which ones were embracing their hotness. On the job from the bottom up didn't help either. It turns impermissible popular answers are a little more than obvious than duds. Nailing down the first four proved tough. We chose the wrong door several times and were on the brink of losing, but we'd get to stay put in every time team Murder messed unmatched up after the States.

party pack 8 jackbox poll mine — (Simulacrum credit: Jackbox Games)

By the clip we'd sussed out the bottom five with answers the likes of "Actually Talented" and "In A Pop Band", I thought our goose was cooked. It was between guitar, just popular, and "Thermal Vampire (movie)". Team Manslayer just had to choose guitar to steal our blowtorch and take it all, but in a superhuman twist of fate, their designated answer-chooser unredeemed connection to the Jackbox website on his phone just as time ran out. You couldn't have planned a finer sabotage!

The blunder gave us the opening we needed to stay in the game. I would've been happy with a make, but a final heavy upset (it turns out Hot Vampire was more popular than Sensible Kinda Sizzling) won us the game. IT was more of a symbolic victory born from a bailiwick error, of course, but it was still sweet.

So yeah, The Poll Mine rules. I'm impressed with how many great social halt mechanism come into shimmer Here—opening with the lighthearted team naming and escalating to strategical deduction, creative thinking, and careful application of Friend knowledge. It's a lot more involved than, say, a shivering doodling sequel same Drawful Quicken, but the beauty of the party carry is that you fundament easily track a tense game of Poll Mine with something lightweight.

In that respect are a a few different standouts in Party Pack 8 that I'm a gigantic fan of like Job Job (a game about answering prompts with words arrogated from unrelated sentences your friends wrote) and Weapons Haggard (a complicated murder mystery where you hide your personal theme song in drawings of weapons). I'd intimate starting with one of those before things capture het up in the Poll Mines.

Morgan has been writing for Personal computer Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff author. Helium has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of senior high and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's rattling cheerful to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes unspecialized news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Construction his build up, and He'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.