OK so something quite interesting was revealed this morning and that’s the final line-up for the sequel to Bother’s Bar party favourite The Jackbox Party Pack The Jackbox Party Pack 2. The line-up includes Fibbage 2 and Quiplash XL and new game Bomb Corp (puzzle game where you work as a team to diffuse bombs and shout at each other), Earwax (impress the judge by selecting the sound effects that best fit a given theme), but the one I want to talk about is a new game called Bidiot, the sequel to Drawful.
And the reason you will want to know about it is that it would fit into Bother’s Bar favourite The Genius nigh-on perfectly.
You’re each given the titles of some pictures you have to draw and are then handed $3,000. Before each lot you sent secret information as to what each picture is worth selling it to art buyers after the auction, just by the titles. The lots come up and everyone bids. When a lot goes the money is removed from your account and the person who drew it gets half the money and you find out what it will go for later at the end. You can bid up your own pieces to try and force someone else to pay over the odds and getting you more money, risking that you’re top bidder and doing yourself out of half your bid money. If you know a piece is worthless you can try bidding up to try and make other people believe there’s massive profit to be made. Halfway through you’re each given a screw to FORCE other people to make a bid. Finally if you’re low on cash you can get credit from a loan shark, although you have to pay it back by the end.
I love it. But I also have reservations – I think you have to draw in good faith, mainly because that’s the funny bit but also because with 12 blank canvasses it’d be a complete crapshoot (they have already inbuilt a certain element of this with several titles that are different but on the same theme, you’ll only get the titles on your phone). The bigger caveat is that Drawful was a complete everyman sort of game – everyone gets it pretty much immediately (draw the thing then try and guess what everyone else was drawing). I’m a bit scared of trying to explain this game to my non-gamey chums who enjoyed Drawful. Although I suppose we could always just play Drawful.
But we will see. The Jackbox Party Pack 2 is out on October 13th on all sorts of different devices and that’s worldwide for $24.99, so probably £15-20 here in the UK.
I get the feeling Earwax will be the “Word Spud” of this pack, if there is one.
I’m happy to see they are trying new things at least, the last thing I want is for these packs to simply become iterations of one another. Although Bidiots definitely appeals to me, I can see it being a real pain to get my friends on board with.
I think it’s a game that sounds quite complicated but you sort of pick up the tactics quickly, the laughs come less from the drawings and more on competitive interplay. Which is fine! But I’m big on immediacy these days and I think I’d be more confident playing this with gamier chums. But I hope to test this hypothesis on people in due course.