This is a general notification to the board at large that the Humble Bundle is offering a bundle of Jackbox games for a very good price.

If you're unfamiliar with Jackbox, they make party games—the kinds of things that you can play with a lot of people and have a good time, and are quite simple. If you've played Cards Against HQ with us, you probably get the idea. However, Jackbox's games are all digital (players use their phones to put in their answers, usually) so they can be a lot more intricate without putting too much strain the minds of the players (who, let's be real here, might be drunk).

A quick caveat here, by the way—as time went on, Jackbox found a lot of success on Twitch. It turns out that people thought it was great fun to watch streamers play party games. This isn't inherently bad, but Jackbox leaned into the success, and added audience participation elements to their later games. Sometimes this turned out great (Quiplash with a large audience is a sight to behold), but a few of their later games have a strong audience focus. Which means you may not get so much out of them (most of us don't stream).

I'm just going to go down a list of at least some of the games in the actual bundle, and ramble on about whether or not I've played them and what I think.

The bundle includes a ton of games in the "You don't know Jack" series, which are one-to-three-player trivia games. They are the least interesting part of the bundle. But if you like trivia games, I hear they're pretty good.

The real stars of the show are the various "party packs", which are collections of more interesting party games. A few of them are also in here separately, but the standalone versions usually have less features.

First of which is the single game that may be reason enough to buy this pack: Quiplash. Quiplash was the very first game Jackbox designed to be played with an audience, but it works just as well without one. Just... imagine Cards Against Humanity, except there are no cards because every answer is write-in, and it's two people choosing answers to each prompt and everyone else votes instead of there being a judge. Oh, and if you have an audience they also vote.

We played this game on Discord last night. It's great.

The other really really popular game in the set is Fibbage, which is all about trying to find the right answer to a question... while trying to convince everyone else that the lie you just made up is the real answer. Everyone lies, everyone guesses, most of the answers are wrong. If you haven't played some game that is basically this game, you still probably get the idea.

Other worthwhile games that I haven't played because I couldn't convince a bunch of people to get in include

-Drawful, which is a cross between Pictionary and Fibbage where someone draws a thing, people have to guess what they drew, and then everyone is shown all the guesses and the original prompt and has to figure out what the prompt was.

-Survive the internet, which is pretty much about taking people's answers to prompts out of context (making them answers to totally different prompts) to make them look ridiculous.

-Monster Seeking Monster, a game where you try to get hearts by successfully hooking up with other players but everyone is secretly a monster with monster powers that can affect the game in different ways and might mean that you don't want to hook up with them. And stuff.

The point is, if you want to have a fun time with some party games, you can't do much better than this. Also I may set them up more on the Discord. Quiplash was pretty fantastic.