If you have a bunch of people over to play games, but not enough controllers to play with everyone, then Jackbox has you covered!  Their newest game is pretty much their take on Family Feud in that you must guess the highest (and sometimes lowest) answers on random surveys.  All you need are cell phones to play!  Just connect to Jackbox.tv on any phone and enter in the room code and you’re in!  It’s pretty simple and works well.  Two to ten players can play, with even more in the audience.  I’m not sure where they get these surveys from, but I think you can submit answers to some of these surveys while you wait your turn to play.  Anyway, The Jackbox Survey Scramble is available on pretty much anything you can play a game on, but reviewed on PS4 here.

There are four main game modes, and you can also do a tour where you do all the game modes right in a row.  Or you can just have the game pick a random one.  So let’s look at each of the modes you can try!

Hilo

Here you are tasked to first pick the highest answers in a survey, and you get more points the higher you go.  And then it’ll ask for you to pick the lowest answers in that survey, and you’ll get points for how low your answers are.  And finally you get to pick from two answers to be the highest one.  Whoever has the most points at the end, wins.

Speed

You must quickly text in as many survey answers as you can.  Of course, higher answers earn more points.  At the end of the time limit, the person with the highest score, wins.

Square

The first two games on this list are pretty easy to understand, but it took a few plays for us to really understand how to play these last two.  Square is kind of like Tic Tac Toe.  Each of the squares is a range of survey answers, and if you guess one in that range, you get the square.  You play this game in teams if you have more than two players.  If you guess an answer higher than your opponents on that same square, you can take over it, unless they picked the top answer and then that square is locked.  Whoever can get three in a row first, wins.

Bounce

This one is like survey Pong!  A paddle is on the bottom of the screen, and you move it left by picking high survey answers, and right by picking low ones.  You play this one in teams, too.  And even if it’s not your turn on the team, you can text in suggestions for them.  Your goal is to keep the ball bouncing with the paddle, and if you miss, the other team gets a point.  It may be tempting to pick the same answers if you know where it’ll make the paddle move, but if you do that, the paddle gets smaller, so be careful.  Whoever gets to five points first, wins.

And those are all the games!  Even though it’s only one title, I still had fun with this one and you should, too.  Especially if you like games such as Family Feud.

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Kid Factor:

The Jackbox Survey Scramble is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Drug Reference, Language, and Suggestive Themes.  A lot of times these Jackbox games have options where you can make the game more family friendly.  But aside from the streaming options where you can block profanity answers, I really didn’t see any of that here.  So it’s the survey answers that really dictate how your experience will be.  When I played, one of the survey topics was adjectives that begin with “S,” and the number one answer was “Sexy.”  And another survey topic was words with double o’s in them, and the top answer for that one was “Boob.”  I’d say older kids who have good reading skills and are savvy with texting on phones should be OK with this.

Tags: Game Reviews