By Luke Thomas, October 28, 2025
“The Jackbox Party Pack 11” is a return to form for the party game franchise after a weak two years, and the title to play at your next holiday gathering.
Developed by Jackbox Games, “The Jackbox Party Pack” is a yearly franchise of five party games anyone can play with just a phone web browser. After the disappointment that was “Party Pack 10” in 2023 and the studio focusing on spin-offs in 2024, Jackbox Games needed a rebound to win back the favor of its core fanbase.
Doominate
“Doominate” is the headliner and straight comedy game of the pack, tasking 3-8 players to take something nice and “ruin” it. It’s a very simple premise, but the added gimmicks of getting to ruin your friends’ favorite things in the second round and fixing those “ruins” in the final round add a lot of variety and more social aspect to the game’s limited concept.
However, the scoring system is a little weak. While games like “Quiplash” award points based on a percentage from a total point pool, “Doominate” opts for each player’s vote counting as 100 to 300 points, which leads to underwhelming point results when the lobby isn’t fully packed.
“Doominate” may not be as big of a crowd-pleaser as “Quiplash,” but the game is a solid twist in the format that warrants complementing the bigger titles occasionally.
Hear Say
I didn’t have high hopes for “Hear Say.” Based on the trailers, it seemed like the game was just making random noises and hoping for laughs.
That’s exactly what “Hear Say” is in practice, but as it turns out, it’s a lot of fun and one of the best in the pack. 2-8 players are tasked with making a certain sound or speech off a prompt like “chant an unfortunate condition,” and after voting, the winning sound will be replayed over an accompanying video.
It’s very simple but breaks new ground for a Jackbox game, being the first to record sounds for gameplay. It surprisingly ends up being very entertaining simply hearing people’s sounds, and the requirement of having to use your voice strengthens the social aspect of the game.
It’s a game that plays a lot better online than in-person, though. If you’re all together recording sounds in the same room, there’ll be a lot of overlap and hearing people’s response to the prompt early. Jackbox Games seemed to want “Hear Say” to play like that, as the trailer leans into the game being chaotically noisy. But in my experience, “Hear Say” is at its peak when played over call.
Cookie Haus
“Cookie Haus” is fittingly in the middle of the pack, as it’s the least elaborate game, both in gameplay and art style. 3-8 players will draw frosting designs on oddly shaped cookie bases prompted off a theme like “Found at the Natural History Museum,” and vote on their favorites from the other bakers. Repeat for two rounds, plus a final round to enhance, or sometimes ruin, a previous cookie, and that’s “Cookie Haus.”
The drawing tools in “Cookie Haus” are very in-depth, allowing for a lot of detail to be put into players’ designs, though the undo button only works for your very last step, which is an odd decision.
Jackbox Games described “Cookie Haus” as its coziest drawing game, and it really succeeds at that. It’s not the funniest or most fun drawing game in the catalog, and the final round’s gimmick of revamping cookies is a weak conclusion, but “Cookie Haus” is a good game to chill and design some odd treats.
Suspectives
“Suspectives” is the social deduction game of the pack, where 4-8 players answer a set of mainly multiple-choice survey questions like “How do you take your coffee?” (with an option for the non-coffee drinkers), until one of them ends up being chosen as the criminal. As the criminal’s answers to the surveys, one being phony, are revealed one-by-one, each player gets a chance to interrogate who they suspect, before locking in their verdict in a very well-orchestrated ending vote.
It’s a great social deduction game, as the concept of using survey answers to create the mystery works well to get people talking with a good mix of specificity in the different surveys. There’s also a filter to have questions be geared toward familiarity with friends or strangers, which is a great inclusion.
It’s not perfect, though, as the inclusion of two lie detector tests, even with only four players, tilts the scales far too much in favor of the detectives, and the final piece of evidence being free-response only tips that weight further. Having a survey question that requires a written answer often reveals too much info that could only be attributed to one player, giving them away with no recourse for giving an honest answer.
Fortunately, there is a setting to replace it with a multiple-choice question. But even with the setting turned on, “Suspectives” still tends to make things too difficult for the criminal, especially if you really know the people you’re playing with or if you have a low player count. Despite the poor balancing, “Suspectives” still ends up being a ton of fun, both as a detective or the criminal.
Legends of Trivia
“Legends of Trivia” is the last and weakest link of the pack. It’s a cooperative cross between a trivia game and a tabletop role-playing game, tasking 1-6 players to explore three lands to solve trivia and slay foes. There’s a okay amount of variation in question types, ranging from the standard multiple-choice to ‘Hidden Question’ trivia to riddles, although those riddles are far too basic. It’s also too easy to win for its limited length and individual games tend to drag on.
But the biggest issue with “Legends of Trivia” is the RPG aspect of the game doesn’t do anything substantial except give a setting for cooperative trivia. Getting questions wrong just means losing your excessively earned gold, either from being attacked or rolling to heal. The in-game shop is limited to the same four basic items, the playable character’s stat differences barely matter except for health, all of the regular enemies fight the same way and getting a higher final score comes down to being lucky with the trivia questions.
The cooperative element of the game is also weak in practice; it usually amounts to one player knowing the answer and saying “pick option B.” And if nobody knows the category for the ‘List It’ round or any of the rapid-fire rounds, the group gets punished score-wise with no recourse.
The amount of content can’t even save “Legends of Trivia” because there’s only three total levels before it’s over. It’s nice to have a dedicated cooperative trivia game in Jackbox’s catalog, but there’s just too many problems and not enough interesting things here, especially for what an RPG trivia game could have potentially been.
As is always the case with Jackbox games, despite allowing for lower player counts, the games here are all substantially weaker at their minimum player counts. But if your group is in the 5-8 player range, possibly at your upcoming holiday get-togethers, “Party Pack 11” might just be the perfect activity.
The audience feature also returns, allowing additional players past the cap to vote on their favorite ruins, sounds or cookies in the vote-based games. But, in “Suspectives,” the audience can only cast visual suspicion during interrogations and, more disappointingly, can only roll to slightly heal players or enemies in “Legends of Trivia.”
Despite lacking a heavy-hitter title, though “Suspectives” comes close, “The Jackbox Party Pack 11” is near the top of the Party Pack sphere for its consistent quality alone. It’s a fantastic purchase for any fans of the franchise, new or old.
