Reviewing Jack Box 7

Is the latest Jack Box pack worth the money?

By Joshua Gallegos

Reporter

The JackBox Party Pack franchise is the gift that keeps on giving, as even years after a game is released friends can still enjoy playing them together. Of course many high school students don’t have a stable source of income, so even if only one person needs to buy the game for everyone to play they might be hesitant to shell out $30 for a game they won’t enjoy. But don’t worry, I’m here to give you my honest opinion about this game so you and your friends can decide to try something new or just stick with Among Us.

I’ll start off by reviewing the “classic” games, which are the games that are sequels or follow a similar format to other popular games. First off is Quiplash 3, which gives players prompts to enter the funniest response they can think of (An example could be “The only thing stopping me from losing faith in humanity is ___,” you can write “David Blayne” or something).

The game hasn’t changed much since the last game, as Joseph Pharchansy notes, “The only thing that I noticed was the graphics of the game and just new answers.”

But like the saying goes, “don’t fix what isn’t broken,” and that definitely applies here as the game keeps the same formula that made it fun in the first place. Also, it seems there is a “Featured Content” page where custom prompts from the JackBox team are shared, and it is unlikely that custom prompts made from players will be featured. Next up is Champ’d Up, and this is definitely one of my favorite games in the pack. Players are given a prompt in the form of a title, then another player’s champion. When they are given someone else’s champion, they won’t know the prompt, so they will just have to guess based on the drawing (An example could be “the champion of the grill,” so you draw a picture of a middle aged man with grass stained shoes. Then you get a picture of a stick figure frowning named “You”. You might guess the prompt is something along the lines of “champion of being alone,” so you draw a picture of a tall dark skinned figure and name it “Joshua” because people always bully me in these games). After everyone’s done, the champions fight while players vote for their favorite ones. This happens twice, with the twist on the second round is that there will be a bonus match with a new prompt. But to make things more interesting, you can swap out your champion from a pool of others from the previous round. But once the game is over, if you decide to play again with the same players, all the drawings from that game will be added to the tag pool. This encourages players to make a wide variety of champions so they will have a larger selection as the game goes on.

“my favorite game would definitely be Champ’d Up. It’s very fun to see what your friends draw,” said Eli Munoz.

Now I’ll talk about the “familiar” games, which are games that take an existing game and change in enough for it to not be considered a sequel. The only game in this pack is Talking Points, which fans of Patently Stupid from the fifth pack will enjoy. Players first fill in three prompts, which will be something like “Ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to know that ___”. You then choose someone else’s answer to give a presentation on. However, you don’t actually get to make the slides, another player will have to create the slides while you’re presenting. If that isn’t difficult enough, the player making the presentation can’t even put whatever they want, they are limited to making a slide with text that says something like “You’ll be shocked to know” or “Despite popular belief,” and a photo after. If you’re curious as to what photos you can use, look up “stock photos” and that will give you a general idea.

The final games are in what I call the “new” category. First off is “Devil’s in the Details,” where players have to complete various tasks to fill up their “family meter”. To be honest, I thought this game was going to be another gimmick game that no one cares about, but it’s actually fun. It encourages communication with each player as well as teamwork. But if you’re not interested in those things, there is also a personal score you get by doing tasks. Occasionally a task will pop up that will get you a lot of points, but doing too many of them will force everyone to stop their task and stall them, forcing them to lose out on valuable time. The final game is Blabber Round, which is an okay game. Players choose a secret word and are given a list of words to describe it. Whoever guesses the word first gets the points. It’s still fun, but compared to the rest of the line up it falls short. Even still you and your friends might enjoy it for a round or two before switching games.

Overall, this game is very fun, but is it worth the $30? As good of a game it is, I can’t say definitively on this.

“I mean the game is fun, but you need at least four to six other friends to be fun, which makes it the situation of getting friends together harder. Honestly I think it should be $15 considering you need a group, you can’t play it alone, and the games only depend on creative people most of the time,” said Ayden Altaffer.

So if you have some money to blow and want a good time, then you should get this game. But if funds will be an issue, then consider looking for other games to play with friends or wait for it to go on sale.

“I would recommend the game to a friend,” said Joseph Pharchansy