Thank you Jackbox Games for sending us this game to review!

While I have not played the first Party Pack game, I am familiar with the makers of You Don’t Know Jack and had high expectations for this title.  Out of the five bundled games in this collection, only one of them was considered a dud by our family. Each game requires internet access and device capable of interacting with the jackbox.tv website to enter the room code and interact with the console/TV prompts.  

Even though the interface is easy to use we have found that the mobile devices occasionally would not respond and had to refresh the website to make it work again.  If the active player’s device wigged out, the game could crash and require restarting.  The responses are all timed and if an answer is not recorded in time, the game will pick one for the tardy player.  

 Here’s a quick summary of each game from the most liked to our least favorite:

Earwax – This game is by far our favorite.  At least three players need to be present and up to eight can join in.  A judge is randomly picked per round and the judge chooses the topic or prompt for the players to base their sound effects on.  The players will anonymously submit their two sound effects from their limited selection and all players can vote on their favorite combination.  A point is awarded to the player that submitted the judge’s favorite sound effects.   The first player to reach three points, wins.

Fibbage 2 – Your goal in this game is to fool players into believing your lie and you vote on the answer that you believe is the truth.  Fooling your friends is worth half of the points of picking the true answer.  If you’re not good at coming up with a lie to fill in the blank, you can have the console lie for you and get half the points as you normally would.  If you have played the original Fibbage, there are five hundred new questions in this version!  Between two and eight players can enjoy this game.

Quiplash – Come up with the best fill in the blank answer and get it voted by everyone to score points.  The player with the highest percentage of votes, wins.  Three to eight players are needed for this game.

Bomb Corp – Up to four players are required to work together and defuse bombs by sharing clues and cutting the proper wires.  One mistake and it’s game over.  How long can you survive?

Bidiots – Up to six players draw two pieces of themed artwork for everyone to bid on.  Each player has a clue to what some of the artwork is worth.  The artist will get half of the sale amount and can use that money to buy more artwork to hopefully sell at a profit.  If a bidder runs out of money they can borrow from Predatory Loans which has some funny jingles worth paying attention to.

Some of the games require user input so filtering that content is impossible.  There is an option to turn off some of the adult themed humor and I suggest doing so if this game is going to be played by or around children.    Without the filter enabled there were sexual moaning, vibrator, and porn music sound effects in Ear Wax.  Also, one of the topics for the round was to pick sound effects for a player’s foreplay session.    Filter or not, there will be plenty of fart and toilet sounds available.

If you don’t mind potty humor, Jackbox Party Pack 2 is bound to bring out some laughs.  While the mobile device issues were annoying, they worked most of the time.  I didn’t have any trouble using my laptop.  The asking price is a reasonable $25 which is not a bad price for five games. Friends, internet access, and a functional jackbox.tv website are required to play this game.  If you have access to all three, it's worth looking into.