The Next Jackbox Party Pack Will Appeal To Among Us Fans

My Jackbox aficionado friends were quick to throw each other into the interrogation room, where one of them hemmed and hawed while the other grilled them profusely. One of them even said their childhood crush was Sailor Moon, which threw everyone else off their scent and had them suspecting me as the criminal. We had gathered to play the latest Jackbox Party Pack 11 days before release, and the most eager ones immediately learned the rules for a game of what I’ve dubbed to be “dog Among Us,” trying to find the imposter dog among the group.

Like the other viral game series, the gameplay involves looking at evidence and interrogating suspects if you’re innocent, and trying to blend in and escape detection if you’re the criminal. But Jackbox’s Suspectives mini-game, aka dog Among Us, has everyone playing as a dog wearing a hat and not an astronaut. And rather than sci-fi, the setting is more like film noir. It was an instant hit among my group of friends, and likely one of the stand-outs of the latest Jackbox Party Pack (can you believe they have already reached 11 packs?) out this week.

Others in the pack include: Doominate, a variation of the usual wordplay game people love to use to showcase their sense of humor; Hear Say, where you have to record a bunch of weird sounds and have them played back to you out of context; Cookie Haus, a cookie-decorating game for the art fiends; and Legends of Trivia, a fun mini-RPG where your characters progress by answering trivia questions correctly. The games usually require at least 3 players to start, although the trivia game can be played with just one. Only one person needs to own the game and everyone else can just use their phones as controllers to join in. The pack offers a good mix of difficulty, with every game being relatively accessible, and perhaps trivia being the toughest for non-gamers, at least in my experience.

After four hours of rapid-fire play, I sat down with the Jackbox Party Pack developers Tim Sniffen and Brooke Breit to ask them about how they put this one together. And was it fair to call Suspectives just a dog Among Us game? Suspectives Game Director Tim Sniffen tells me that he won’t argue with any Among Us comparisons, though he notes that his game asks people weirder personal details as points of interrogation. “Dogs in fedoras in a gritty crime-filled noir cityscape just felt right,” Sniffen says.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

Making the 11th edition of this game, what sort of thoughts were going through your head?

Doominate Game Director Brooke Breit: As we started talking about The Jackbox Party Pack 11, the studio was met with the notion of “what if this pack was all brand new ideas?”. It was an invigorating and inspiring challenge that opened the door to some really fresh concepts.

Post-2020, are fewer people playing Jackbox now?

Sniffen: I'd say it's less about total numbers and more about the ways we've seen players interacting with our games. Since 2020, Jackbox has become part of both in-person get-togethers and virtual hangouts, which has grown the way that our fans can play and watch.

I noticed Doominate is kind of like Quiplash but you changed the name.

Breit: Like Quiplash, Doominate is a head-to-head comedy game, but it asks something uniquely devious of the players by having them add something to a premise to wreck it. In that way, the answers become little stories. Players are essentially adding conflict to ideas, creating funny twists and turns that are then built upon even further in the final round, when we ask players to try and un-ruin the hilarious messes they’ve made.

The sound game, Hear Say, is really unique and weird. What's the story behind its invention? Any fun anecdotes from playtesting?

Breit: From the beginning, when Hear Say was first pitched as a game idea, we were all rolling on the floor laughing. There were so many playtests where we were cry-laughing and then having to explain to our families why we were screaming like a bird choking on a bagel.

Cookie Haus has a few annoying NPCs, like one that is a caricature of an Australian. Is that meant as some kind of veiled critique towards Australians or macho men?

Breit: Our NPCs are developed from a place of love, magical gibberish technology and an unsatiated desire for specifically decorated cookies.

Sniffen: We love and stan every beautifully bizarre member of the Cookie Haus world, starting with cow-shopkeeper Moonique. The only NPC customer designed with a social critique in mind was the Robot Otter: Nobody is going after Cyborg Otters right now, and we’re doing our best to change that.

What's your stance on people lying in Suspectives? The game was fun enough that my friends easily agreed to a round two. This time, my partner was the criminal and he accidentally told everyone he was an “avid fisherman” in childhood — a very specific clue that easily gave him away. He insists that wasn't a misplay but that he was just following the rules of the game. Surely the game allows people to lie, right?

Sniffen: Every Suspectives game begins with a handful of survey questions, and how you handle them is up to you. But keep in mind: there are several points in the game where a player’s survey answer might be revealed, which can blow up in your face if you’ve, you know, been spinning a web of lies. We encourage players to interact in whatever way gives them the best chance of escaping undetected!

The RPG Trivia game was really tough. How did you balance the difficulty for that game? And a question about Baby Shark was a bit of unexpected pop trivia ... it makes me wonder, what's the average age of a Jackbox player?

Breit: Legends of Trivia captures the essence of pub trivia, allowing and encouraging players to work together. The cooperative experience allows everyone to shine when it’s their wheelhouse! Our hope is always to have a mix of questions that cross generations, so that teens can play with their grandparents because everyone deserves the chance to destroy a monster with trivia.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Sniffen: While we’re busy working on our individual games, we can lose track of other teams’ progress, which allows for cool surprises. I remember seeing the Hear Say avatars animating in their wild jumpy style alongside player voiceover recordings for the first time… and losing it. We couldn’t stop laughing. It’s wonderful when a game mechanic hits that hard right out of the gate.

Jackbox Party Pack 11 is out now on PC, Mac, and streaming devices.