The heat is on. I’m halfway through a round of Hilo, a new game featured in The Jackbox Survey Scramble, and I need some points if I’m going to win. I’m competing against three members of the Jackbox staff as we’ve taken turns guessing the best sandwich fixings and getting points depending on how popular our responses were among other players. Now, we need to guess the worst response on a list that’s over 270 entries long. My instinct would have been to write “mayonnaise,” but, sickeningly, that’s the No. 2 most popular answer. If I want to win, I’ll need to think like a Jackbox player.
“Poop,” I write. Sure enough, it pops up near the middle of the list.
That’s the comedic reversal of The Jackbox Survey Scramble compared to the developer’s previous Party Packs. Rather than writing witty prompts and cracking jokes, this side collection is more about letting other player’s gags lead the comedy act. The result is a fun experiment that finds the Jackbox team at a creatively invigorated phase of its career — all to the benefit of its players.
Survey says …
The Jackbox Survey Scramble isn’t your typical Jackbox Party Pack. You won’t be drawing pictures, following along with a long set of rules, or playing a variant of any familiar games. Instead, all four games (with two more to come) here are focused around a core idea: surveys. Each game asks players a question. What’s the best cat name? What are words you see in a comic book? Each submitted one-word answer is then stored in a database, reviewed by a moderation team, and pushed back into the game. That means that its answers aren’t static; they change over time as more people play, making for Jackbox’s most dynamic game yet.
“When you come back to this game, it will be different,” game director Tim Sniffin tells Digital Trends when explaining his vision for Survey Scramble as a Jackbox game with a long shelf life. “In part, because you’ve played it, but also because everyone’s playing it. It has the potential to be a nice reflector of the world around it.”
The idea of simply guessing answers may sound a little less zany than, say, Drawful, but the Jackbox team finds a lot of ways to twist that idea. Hilo is a spin on Family Feud that has players trying to guess the top- and lowest-ranked responses to a question. It’s more casual in its pace as players have a good chunk of time to consider their answers over a few rounds. Speed is a much more hectic version of that, in which every player submits as many responses as possible as a timer ticks. More time is added on the clock as players submit answers that are on the board. It’s a hectic race, though, as players can’t submit an answer if someone else has already gotten it. Those two modes have the same core idea, but the energy is entirely different.
What’s surprising is how Survey Scramble takes a step back from the microphone to let its players make the jokes. It’s a far cry from this year’s Jackbox Naughty Pack, which is filled with absurd prompts. The comedy here more comes from trying to guess how people would respond to a question. When trying to figure out a terrible sandwich topping, I’m surprised when I realize that “mud” is a popular answer. I get a good chuckle imagining hundreds or thousands of other people being inspired to write that.
“We’ve often said let’s set the people playing our games up to be the funny people,” Sniffin says.” We never want to outshine the people actually playing, and this one even more so. With Survey Scramble, we set up the space for people to go in and have fun, but the biggest endorphin hits are ‘I can’t believe that’s on this list,’ which means someone out there — or dozens of people! — actually wrote this.”
What’s impressive is how creative Jackbox gets with these ideas. Bounce is a spin on Breakout where a ball bounces around the screen as two teams try to answer survey prompts. Accepted answers are shown as a paddle on the bottom of the screen, with the most popular ones pushing it further to the left side of the screen. The idea is for each team to serve the ball back to their opponent by moving the paddle through inputting survey answers that will position them in the right spot. Players can reuse prompts here, but the paddle will get shorter when writing reused answers.
The best, and most ingenious, game in the pack is Squares. It’s essentially a game of Tic-Tac-Toe where two teams need to connect three squares on a grid. How do you do that by answering survey questions? Each space represents a range of answers. To get the first spot, players need to correctly guess one of the top three answers to a prompt. The bottom-right corner represents any answer ranked under 70. To win, it’s not just about figuring out the most popular response; sometimes you might need to figure out a middling one that’ll land you in the 35 range.
In my round, the two teams fight to figure out the most awkward things one could do in an elevator. My team locks up the first square easily, but we have to dig deep to connect a line on the left side of the grid. Sure, everyone is going to say “fart,” but how many are going to say “lick” or “die?” It’s surprisingly strategic and among one of the most creative Jackbox games I’ve played in years. And like a lot of the team’s games, it began as a physical idea.
“Squares was an idea on a whiteboard,” producer Rich Gallup tells Digital Trends. “We sent out a survey internally to the studio and said ‘hey everyone, can you answer these 10 to 15 questions for us with one word answers?’ That gave us a big spreadsheet full of answers to start with. We said, ‘let’s start doing some murals and jam boards,’ and we drew things straight on a whiteboard. Someone drew a grid on a whiteboard and said ‘here are some numbers.’ When you’re all together, virtually or in-person, and you’re just doing a medium you can just erase, that’s how you start. We do that with so many of our Jackbox games.”
Survey Scramble comes at an intriguing moment for Jackbox. After years of iterating on its Party Pack formula, and finding tremendous success for it during COVID-19 lockdowns, the studio now finds itself in an experimental phase. That’s led to ideas like the Jackbox Megapicker and the Naughty Pack. And that hasn’t just led to smaller teams working on multiple projects at once, but opened the door for creativity. Gallup notes that the approach gives each team member more opportunities to create games or lead projects. That’s important for a studio like this, which has been making the same flavor of game for a decade.
“This year, in particular, has felt really different, new, and exciting because of our ‘let try different things’ mentality,” Sniffin says. “This was really invigorating to work on because it was like we just haven’t done anything like this before.”
I can feel that energy in The Jackbox Survey Scramble, which plays like a studio doing a development improv riff on one idea rather than settling into its old routine. But if you’re a longtime player, you don’t need to worry about the studio’s signature style changing anytime soon; “poop” and “fart” will still get you far.
The Jackbox Survey Scramble is available now on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
