Hands on with The Jackbox Survey Scramble

As a fan of Family Feud, I was always curious, who are the people that are surveyed to help generate the top answers that go onto the board. While I never never got the elusive phone call to participate in curating responses…it seems the team at Jackbox Games will finally let me have my cake and eat it too.

In their upcoming standalone party title The Jackbox Survey Scramble, the company looks to crowdsource answers which will power four party games which are guaranteed to bring plenty of laughs at your next gathering or livestream. Utilizing their proprietary browser based interface, up to 10 players and 10,000 audience members can participate/witness the chaos. Once you’ve joined a game, you can actually provide one word answers to what seems like an infinite amount of questions (it’s actually over 200) and your answers help shape the list of answers.

 

 

As users feed answers into the survey database, what you might’ve seen as a top answer in one game can stumble down the list the next time you encounter that survey in game (Although I don’t think sky will ever get dethroned as the number 1 answer for the question “Name something blue”…but hey prove me wrong people). At launch Survey Scramble will have four game modes, 2 single player modes and 2 team modes, and while I did try all the modes during my session, I will only be discussing HiLo and Squares. I mean I have to save some surprises for when the game comes out on October 24th. But worry not, the Jackbox team promises the game will get new game modes in the near future.

HiLo was the first mode of my hands on. It’s a PvE mode where players try to guess the answers which are ranked the highest or lowest. The higher your answer’s placement when you’re asked to give high ranking answers or the inverse will net you the most points. After a couple of rounds the game’s penultimate question will have you choosing between 2 answers and which ranks higher than the others. After the dust is settled, the game also reveals that survey’s top 10 answers which is a nice touch, although when you’ll re-encounter that question can be anyone’s guess.

Squares is a team based game which allows you to tic-tac-toe where your square selection is determined by how well you can place answers for the survey topic at hand. Each square contains a range (1-2, 3-5 to 70+). Each team alternates by providing answers and the answer’s placement on the list range determines what square you can claim. However if the opposing side manages to provide an answer that is higher than yours they can steal the square from you…giving way to some tense moments. Thankfully if your answer is the top answer for the range, it would be impossible to exceed it so in that situation the square is locked to the team who had the top answer. In the several sessions of Squares I’ve seen a game that went to the wire and only concluded because of a decisive square theft and I’ve also seen a game which ended in 3 short rounds simply because one team was either that good/lucky in their guesses. While each player takes turns answering, those sitting on the sidelines won’t have to sit on their hands, they can provide suggestions for their teammates and possibly opponents if they just aren’t verbose enough to come up with answers (That was me to the tee on some surveys…).

I will not lie, it was nice to go against the grain and actually play games with people and seeing some of the answers people gave evoked genuine laughter from me. I can only hope that I will be able to play this game with people in the future. For those who aren’t wallflowers, The Jackbox Survey Scramble can enhance your social gatherings when it comes out on PC, Switch, the Xbox and PlayStation platforms October 24th.