Parents' Guide to The Jackbox Party Pack 6

This is the sort of game that's only as much fun as the people who are playing. The Jackbox Party Pack 6 can be played by just one player (Trivia Murder Party 2), but it's really designed to be experienced by as many as 10 players in the same room, with potentially thousands more watching online. It's largely about the group's interactions. Trivia questions don't require much player interaction, but games that involve a certain level of creativity -- such as creating jokes with an aim to make your friends laugh, devising goofy but believable definitions to fake phrases, and quickly sketching out pictures -- are best when the players are a little more outgoing and willing to take risks for laughs. The experience will likely be fairly raucous for groups of close friends, and more muted for loose-knit collections of acquaintances.

The games themselves are easy to understand and learn, and provide a natural springboard for group guffaws as players try to outdo their friends' silliness. Role Models is perhaps the most basic, but also among the most fun, forcing players to reveal what they really think of everyone else in the room. Joke Boat, meanwhile, encourages zaniness by empowering players to not only compose but also perform their own zingers for an audience of friends. We did run into a handful of stability issues -- a couple of players got booted from games midsession -- and we would have appreciated some sort of overarching meta mode that combined multiple games into a single, Olympic-style event, but The Jackbox Party Pack 6 should prove plenty of fun at your next big casual gamer get-together.