I’m of the belief that the Jackbox Party Packs elevate any party, but the games contained within can be rather time-consuming. Be prepared to set aside 15 to 20 minutes for one round of Trivia Murder Party or Quiplash, and a single round is rarely enough. If you want to capture that same frantic energy without the significant time commitment, the studio’s latest release, The Jackbox Survey Scramble, feels like the perfect middle ground.
The Jackbox Survey Scramble features four game modes: Hilo, Speed, Squares, and Bounce. All four revolve around answers to surveys from real people all around the world. Depending on the mode you choose, you might be tasked with finding the most popular answers, guessing the least popular answers, or simply providing as many answers as possible as quickly as possible. The gameplay doesn’t change much, but the strategy does.
For instance, in Hilo (as the name suggests), you first attempt to guess the most popular single-word answer to one of three surveys that all the players will vote on. The surveys are extremely varied, spanning from dating red flags to winter activities.
Let’s say you chose winter activities. Whoever guesses the most popular answer gets the most points, so if you say “skiing” and your friend says “drinking,” whichever is closer to the top of the survey wins, similar to the game show Family Feud. Then the tables are turned, and the goal is to ascertain the least popular answers. They still have to appear on the list somewhere, but the closer they are to the bottom, the more points you’ll receive.
Hilo is my favorite of the four, but they all make brilliant use of the conceit. At first glance, Speed looks the same as Hilo, but instead of taking turns trying to decide which answers might be high or low on the list, you are simply trying to guess as many answers as possible before time runs out. Whoever finds the most survey answers wins.
The other modes are a bit more complicated. In Squares, two teams try to complete a row in a 3×3 grid by guessing answers that correspond to the numbers in the squares. The first square contains the top 3 answers from the survey, the second square contains the next 5, and so on. It’s a mix of luck and intuition, but the mode also amps up the competition by allowing you to steal a square if you guess a higher answer within the correct range.
You might need to play Bounce several times before you grasp it. It’s basically Pong, but every answer you enter moves a paddle around at the bottom of the screen. Guess a popular answer, and the paddle moves left. Guess an unpopular answer, and the paddle moves right. Also, once you’ve guessed a word, you can tap it again to move the paddle back.
All four of the game modes are fun and fast, and they don’t get stale if you’re jumping between them. Thankfully, the game makes it easy to play them all with Tour mode, which cycles through all four in order. We managed to get through a whole “tour” in about 15 minutes or so, and when we realized how quickly we’d played all four game modes, we jumped right back in for a second tour. Highly recommended if you aren’t sure where to start.
As for longevity, you might see a survey twice if you play enough times, but Jackbox accounted for this by sending guesses players submit to a database. Those guesses are then tossed back into the game as answers, so no survey will ever look exactly the same.
The highest compliment I can ever pay The Jackbox Survey Scramble is to put it in my regular rotation of home party games, which is precisely where it belongs. I’m thrilled that there’s now a family-friendly, simple option available the next time my friends visit.
The Jackbox Survey Scramble is now available on Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Epic Games, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV for $9.99.
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