Parents' Guide to The Jackbox Party Pack 8

THE JACKBOX PARTY PACK 8 provides groups of up to 10 players -- local or online -- with five games meant to make people engage with one another, be a bit creative, and laugh. Up to 10,000 additional people can join in by becoming part of your game's online audience (should you choose to allow them), watching you and your friends draw silly pictures and answer fun questions. Just one copy of the game is required, but each player needs a phone and an internet connection so that they can navigate to the Jackbox website, where they enter a four-letter code for the current game so they can begin playing. The games are a mixed bunch, but some will be familiar to returning players. Drawful Animate, for example, tasks players to draw a pair of pictures, loops them to create the illusion of motion, and then lets other players come up with titles for the image. Another, called the Poll Mine, provides players with instructions to rank a number of selections from a list, then try to guess how everyone in the room voted. The Wheel of Enormous Proportions, meanwhile, provides simple trivia questions that players need to answer in order to earn as many slots as possible on a wheel that allocates points based on the luck of the spin. Weapons Drawn is a "social deduction" game that has players drawing murder weapons by cleverly sketching around a letter drawn from their own names, then seeing if other players can guess the culprit. And Job Job is a fast-paced writing game that sees players piecing together weird sentences from the words in other player's answers to simple icebreaker questions. A variety of settings allow parents to censor more mature content (both game- and player-generated), increase or even switch off timers, and generally make the experience a little more accessible to anyone in need of a little help.