Review: THE JACKBOX SURVEY SCRAMBLE Contains 4 fun survey games

Jackbox Games was recently released The Jackbox poll race. This is a new collection of survey-based games that you can buy now for $9.99 for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

The Jackbox team was kind enough to provide me with a digital copy for PC for the purposes of this review, but all thoughts below are my own. If you want to play, you can purchase it from your favorite store, including Humble (affiliate link).

Find out how people across the country think! Jackbox Survey Scramble is a collection of hilarious survey games, using real one-word answers from real people. Truly!

At first glance, Poll of polls sounds like a Family feud-type of game, but there’s more. First, it’s not just a single game. There are currently four unique games and two more are “coming soon.” Also, the game says it collects information from the answers you give to influence future answers, which is maybe good but maybe also questionable? Discuss in the comments.

The first game to talk about is HI. In this game mode (and all others) all players vote for the topic from a list of three. Then, for a few rounds, everyone guesses (with one-word answers) the survey responses that ranked highest.

Eventually it will change and you will try to guess the least popular answers. After a few rounds, he might go back to looking for more popular answers or call him and name the winner. Very similar Family feudsome of the answers will shock and horrify you.

However, unlike Family Feud, there are sometimes hundreds of answers in the list giving you a wide window of potential. You will also have to be careful because if multiple players guess the same answer, the points will be split between you. HI it was probably my favorite of the current four games, but it was close.

Then we have Speed. In Speedeveryone simply has to guess as many answers as fast as possible to accumulate points. Over time you will get multipliers to get even more points.

This really seems crazy, but fun in that way. During the short pauses where the game introduces a multiplier, you can also see the percentage of answers that everyone got right. Plus, at the end, it shows you all the correct answers in the list and who guessed each one correctly. This is fun too.

Third we have Squares which was probably my second favorite of the bunch. This is a team game where your team guesses the answers while also playing tic tac toe. There are nine squares with different ranges of answers needed to mark that square.

For example, the first two responses for the survey are the first panel, responses 3 to 6 are the second panel, etc. Each person on the team gets their own turn, but other team members can input hints (so the other team doesn’t hear) for that player to use on their turn. If you guess the highest answer of a square, you lock it and it cannot be stolen.

If you guess a higher answer than you already guessed, you steal the box. If you guess an answer not in a square or below the current value of the square, you can try again. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot of fun.

We finally have it Rebound. Me and my group didn’t like this game. It’s like a competitive version of Brick Break where after the ball bounces off the racket, control passes to the other team and the racket moves based on how popular your guess is in the poll.

The top answers are on the left and the bottom answers are on the right. It’s a strange thing because you have to be fast, but it’s also slow, and in our opinion it’s not good to play. I don’t think any of us liked it very much.

Survey Scramble also has two great features right out of the box. When you first launch the game, I highly recommend selecting Tour. This will take you through one playthrough of each of the four included games. This is a quick way to play them all once and see what you like and don’t like.

The other is Pick For Me which simply selects one of the games at random. My only complaint here is that I wish I could say exclude certain games to better suit the group’s likes and dislikes (e.g. my group would remove Bounce as an option).

Looking ahead, there are new game modes Dash AND dare and both seem to have potential. I’m definitely interested in trying these out as a free upgrade soon.

• Dash

  • The race has begun! You’re competing against your fellow players – find the most popular answer in a group of options from one of our huge lists to get ahead. Double your pick for more progress (or more punishment), send extra picks to your opponents’ list to slow them down, and tune in to public opinion to outdo everyone on your way to the finish line.

• dare

  • Decide the stakes for other players! You decide whether another player has to guess something higher or lower on the list than what was just revealed. Give them an almost impossible challenge… but don’t be surprised when they manage to achieve it and accumulate points. After completing a challenge, turn around, share the love, and challenge another player.

Honestly, I really like it Poll of polls. It seems small because all the games are survey-based, but I think they found great ways to make them unique. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves Jackbox and Family feud.