The Jackbox Survey Scramble Review - Steve, We'd Like To Play | TechRaptor (2024)

Only a little bit over a month since we saw the release of The Jackbox Naughty Pack here we are again in a room with our friends loading up our phones to play The Jackbox Survey Scramble. This game, smaller in size again than the rest of the pack, relies on strange prompts and survey answers to create a Family Fued-like experience perfect for the whole family.

The Jackbox Survey Scramble is a collection of four games where players will use survey prompts and the answers that the team at Jackbox Games collected to try to guess the most common answer, line up three in a row, or even use the popularity to play a game of Pong.

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The four games included in this collection are HILO, Squares, Bounce, and Speed.

HILO Puts Your Opinion Against The World

The concept behind HILO is simple, a question has been asked of the Jackbox Games community and has been ranked in order of how frequently they were answered. At first in this game, you'll be asked to try to guess what the most common answers are.

The question might be "What is your favorite sandwich ingredient?" and from there you just need to guess and predict which one might be more likely. Is it Ham or Mayonnaise?

There's an interesting extra level of strategy to HILO that if you get the same answer as another player your points are split. This means even if you're absolutely certain you know what the most liked sandwich ingredient is if you get the same answer as another you could still end up in last place.

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After getting to answer the top of the list for a while you then get a chance to guess what's at the bottom of the list.

The game is simple in premise but the wide (and strange) variety of prompts that the Jackbox team comes up with constantly has you questioning where you might think the best answer could be coming from.

Guess With Accuracy For Squares

Squares was the game I ended up being most excited to play. The game functions as if the leaderboard from HILO was crammed into a game of tic-tac-toe. Each square on the board can be marked by a team if they manage to guess a term in that position on the board.

For example, if you answer the number 1 or 2 most common response then you'll get the top left square, if you want the middle square your guess needs to be within the range of 16-20. Getting to mark a square by guessing a value in a range also adds an extra level of chaos if one team's guess is 19th in position, and the other team gets the 16th most popular response then they're able to steal the square.

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Squares is an incredible way to take popular data and turn it into a completely different game. It also shakes things up from HILO that it's not just about getting the things at the top of the pack but if you know which square you need to win the game it's about guessing where some value might fit in.

Each game only lasts 1-5 minutes but my friends and I just kept loading back into the game. It was so fun to talk openly and speculate/react to the different positions of answers while using our phones to communicate different ideas and pool guesses with the rest of my team.

I just wanted there to be more, whether it be a shutout mode or a 5x5 grid option the game always felt like it was over too quickly.

Bounce Takes Pong's Premise And Makes It Stressful

Bounce was by far the most stressful and difficult of the games. Just like how Squares turned the data from the surveys into tic-tac-toe Bounce turns the game into Pong. Each team takes turns to enter a word, depending on the popularity of that word a paddle will appear in that space.

The further left the paddle is the more popular a response is and as the paddle heads further to the right the guesses get less popular.

It's up to your team to be the first to reach five points as you play a stressful game of word guessing and pong.

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This is by far the hardest of the games, mostly because it has such an active element to it. Add to that penalties for reusing the same word in the form of shorter paddles and it's an instant recipe for stress.

While it was fast and frantic unfortunately Bounce didn't give too much in terms of the communal laughs that I come to love from Jackbox titles. I'm sure there will be some competitive players out there that are into this but I suspect for most casual Jackbox players this will be their least played title.

Speed

For Speed the title is all you really need to know, it's all about going fast. In Speed, all players are somewhat working collaboratively to get every possible word for a given category. Here it's not about whether you get 1, 2, or 3 but trying to guess as many as possible in a given time.

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For each successful guess the individual player receives points as well as additional time to be added to the timer. The faster you're answering successfully the more time you'll have to play the game and rack up point multipliers.

Much like Bounce this game sucked a bit of the fun out of the game, some chuckles were had as crazy guesses were showing success, but the game was going so rapidly that you never had time to look at what everyone else was up to.

At the end of the game, you are shown every guess that occurred quickly, but a bit too fast to really get to spend on any of the ridiculous options.

This will appeal to some players, but when HILO and Squares are on offer that's likely where you'll gravitate.

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An Ever-Evolving Jackbox Game

Unlike other Jackbox titles where the games are static, the most unique aspect of Survey Scramble is that these survey questions are still fed to players are they sit on the home screen before jumping into a game.

This means that while you might know what the most frequent response for the best movie with a one-word title is if you were to play this again in a week, a month, a year, then the answer would likely be different.

Jackbox Games has also announced that additional game modes will be added to the game in a free update before the end of the year

The Jackbox Survey Scramble Review | Final Thoughts

Just when I think Jackbox Games surely can't come up with anything crazier than what they already have they manage to absolutely flip the formula on its head. While Bounce and Speed didn't land I think I would be able to play HILO and Squares for hours in a single sitting just trying to get into the psyche of how people would have answered.

If the Jackbox Naughty Pack is to play with the group chat and regular Jackbox Party Packs are for friends and family, Jackbox Survey Scramble is truly the best title to play with everyone, even in a work scenario.

TechRaptor reviewedThe Jackbox Survey Scrambleon PC with a code provided by the developer over the course of 2 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken during the process of review.

The Jackbox Survey Scramble Review - Steve, We'd Like To Play | TechRaptor (2024)
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