2024 might go down as Jackbox's biggest year yet. The long-awaited Megapicker is out and functional. The Jackbox Naughty Pack is making Jackbox nights spicier for everyone everywhere. And that would have been enough, especially considering this year was meant to be a break from their annual Party Pack format.
Instead of hitting the brakes and coasting through the end of the year though, Jackbox Games hit the accelerator and released another game in the form of The Jackbox Survey Scramble... and it might just be my favorite thing they've done in years.
Just the Facts |
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Developer: Jackbox Games |
Publisher: Jackbox Games |
Platform(s): PC*, PS4/5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch *platform reviewed on |
Price: $9.99 |
Release Date: October 24, 2024 |
Key provided by fortyseven communications. |
After The Jackbox Naughty Pack, which we enjoyed but found limiting due to its raunchier vibe, Survey Scramble leans hard in the other direction to offer a gameplay experience that, really, speaks to what Jackbox is all about: games anyone can hop into and enjoy.
In my go-to Jackbox group, we've got people who mainly like trivia games, those who mainly like drawing games, those who are just there for jokes. And somehow, Survey Scramble proved to satisfy us all.
The Jackbox Survey Scramble is a data-based trivia game that has players making guesses about the most and least popular responses to simple survey questions. Think Family Feud meets Jackbox silliness, presented with more variety in how you make your guesses. The data is pulled from real surveys and real people all around the world, with up to 500 potential answers per question. What makes it even more intriguing though is the fact that, through player contributions, Survey Scramble's data will update and be enhanced over time. This dataset should keep up with the times, rather than be the kind of thing that has you thinking backwards in time to speculate at the possible cultural context for your answers.
Everyone can name a relationship red flag, but do you know what the 215th most popular one is? And is there a topical new one everyone's talking about that you might have to consider? We can all guess at the most coveted superpowers, but what if you need to latch onto specifically the 50th most popular one to win a round of Squares? And did a superhero movie come out recently that might skew the numbers?
Simple ideas spread out across four unique game modes (additional game modes are set to hit before the end of the year) make The Survey Scramble one of the most accessible and enjoyable for the broadest set of people possible. And that's what we loved about Jackbox early on.
Hilo (2-10 players)
In Hilo, players are asked to find the most popular answers to a question... and the least popular. Across four rounds — two for the highest, two for the lowest — players will toss their ideas into the ether and fight for the high score. Players are ranked against each other based on how high (or low) their answer is in comparison to the other players, so even if your answer is lower than you'd expect, if everyone else is just as off, you'll still score big points. But be careful, if you toss in the same answer as someone else, even if you nail first place, you'll end up having to split your points with them.
After everyone is scored, there is one final shot to earn points as everyone is asked to pick between two given answers to guess which is higher, and then a winner is awarded.
Hilo is the simplest distillation of the Family Feud survey experience. And that makes it one of the easiest to enjoy. Just try to guess the most popular and least popular and be on your way. The least popular angle is fun, as you have to think niche enough to be toward the bottom but not niche enough that your answer doesn't appear on the list at all. And when each player presents their answers, one by one, there's a simple joy in seeing where answers lie on the list and how far off your friends were.
Our only slight gripe was with how quickly this mode slid past us at times. We started to wish we could have some amount of customization to lengthen a session with each survey question, as you'll often only reveal 20-40 answers of a possible 500. Meaning there's lots of room to add in more rounds.
Either way, Hilo is the best way to showcase the concept and is endlessly replayable. We're curious how much these categories will change once the Jackbox community gets its hands on it (a "one word to describe your boss" category baffled our group with how... nice it was).
My score: 5/5 Group score: 4.5/5
Speed (2-10 players)
For those players who want to see a more complete list of survey responses, Speed is the mode for you. In Speed, players will rapidly shoot out as many responses to the survey question as possible, with each valid response helping to add more time to the clock. Every so often, if the answers are still pouring in and the clock keeps ticking up, the game will pause and give everyone a score update and a multiplier for the next round of guessing. As answers fly off the board, point multipliers come with each subsequent break: 2x to 3x to 4x.
Speed is pure chaos. Rather than the laidback guessing of Hilo or the upcoming team mode Squares, Speed is just about thinking fast and varied to steal as much of the board of answers as possible. Trying to think of many oddball answers to these prompts was so fun, and you'll be shocked at how off-kilter some of the responses end up (and what things aren't there, too).
It's a little less fun than Hilo, if for no other reason than it feeling a little less social — everyone's focused on submitting rapid fire answers rather than communicating in the moment — and a little less satisfying in the way it is built to simply fizzle out as answers slow to a stop. But everyone communally working to fill out the list feels in its own way cooperative, despite a winner still being named at the very end. We'd honestly just as much love a zen version, where we try to fill out a list with no time limits, or slightly longer ones, but that's why it's a game!
My score: 4/5 Group score: 4/5
Squares (2-10 players)
Squares is the first of Survey Scramble's team modes, pitting two groups of players against each other to play a bit of survey-based tic-tac-toe. You're presented with a survey question and a 3x3 grid of squares that represent certain ranges of the popular answers. First square is for the top two answers, second is for 3-5, and so on.
As long as you don't get the top answer in the range for a square — doing so locks in the square for your team — opponents can steal a square by guessing something higher than whatever your guess was. Get three in a row in any direction and you win.
The competitive nature of this mode, of working as a team to populate a list of suggestions (one player per round, on a rotating basis, must submit the answer, and the rest of the team is left to suggest items for the leader to pick from), and of trying to think very specifically about answers that'll fit in the square you need to win, all adds up to make this simply survey concept into something really engaging and thinky. Desperately needing to steal a specific square and having to come up with an answer that fits within the 31-50 range of most popular responses makes for some of the most interesting thinking we've done in any Jackbox game.
Our only issue, which carries through into the next mode, too, is the way they split the roles between "submitter" and "suggester." Oftentimes, players wouldn't notice they were the next in charge of submitting, and may toss out an idea that suddenly becomes your entire turn done in one. But beyond that... Squares is far and away the best version of the survey concept. We're already imagining concepts for 1v1 or 2v2 matches within our group to push the mode to its limits.
My score: 5/5 Group score: 5/5
Bounce (2-10 players)
Last on the list of available game modes at launch is the most divisive one for us: Bounce. Bounce plays like a Pong/Breakout mashup where teams are meant to keep a ball bouncing back against the roof and walls of the arena by moving a paddle back and forth. You move the paddle by guessing survey responses, like all the other modes, and where that answer sits on the range from most to least popular responses will place your paddle in a specific spot on the range. Precision is key here.
At the start, players can submit a few answers in a test round to get a sense of what the scale looks like, but after that, they're let loose to bounce. If your paddle misses, the other team scores. If you reuse a word, your paddle will shrink and can only be expanded if you use a new word. First to five points wins.
It's the most involved version of the survey concept and one that had our group conflicted. It's certainly interesting conceptually, but thanks to a few flaws in execution, it ended up more stressful than it was worth for our group, more often than not. It feels less about the interesting thinking of answers and more about having good reflexes.
Our biggest issue echoes the issue we had in Squares, where folks found they were suddenly thrust into the role of controlling the paddle and unable to keep up with the speed, particularly at the end when the ball is bouncing quickly and decisions have to be even quicker.
Our main suggestions to make Bounce more enjoyable include extending the practice round, so that players have a deeper pool of answers to consider once things are going, and to be able to designate one player as the team leader who is always in charge of the paddle. With more strict team roles, the person in charge of the paddle can focus on being ready to set the paddle back and forth while the rest of the team can toss out their suggestions. To bring this one higher on our list, we're looking for anything that adds in a bit more control to something that is asking for such precise timing, typing, and thinking simultaneously.
In the end, we appreciated them trying something so involved with Bounce, and we think with some accessibility considerations it could be great. But as it stands now, it is not how we'll choose to scramble our surveys a majority of the time.
My score: 3/5 Group score: 3/5
The Jackbox Survey Scramble, despite technically being one game and one main concept, feels just as full and engaging as a proper Party Pack, and that's thanks to the simplicity of its ideas. There's a reason Family Feud persists.
Trivia that asks you to make observations about the world around you is always enjoyable, because it makes you feel connected, it enlightens you to things you might not have considered (people really like their bosses these days), and feels like the kind of thing anybody can hop into and enjoy. We missed the personality of other Jackbox games at times, but keeping the data up front and center was the right choice in the end. But don't worry, Survey Scramble has a banger of an outro song still!
As long as content is added (we did run into a few repeat questions) and those continued modes and data refreshes keep it interesting, we're ready to loop this into party nights from here on out.
Video Games are Good and The Jackbox Survey Scramble is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)
+ the simple survey concept is perfect for all to hop into, each mode feels vastly different than the last in surprising ways, endless replayability that comes with regular player data updates
- a few modes suffer from accessibility issues, lacking personality, dependent on new data and questions being added over time
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