Last night Jackbox Games showed off a live work in progress (underlining that twice) version of YDKJ’18 coming to Jackbox 5 this autu… er fall. I was very interested to see how it would work, now that it’s going to support eight players and audience play, which means there would have to be changes certainly to account for stream lag so things surely can’t be quite as time sensitive. Here are my key takeaways:
- They’ve gone all-in on being themed around Binjpipe, a parody streaming service.
- Cookie Masterson is back.
- Questions are worth a flat amount of money $1/2,000, BUT correct answers also get a bonus dependant on what percentage of the audience gets the question wrong ($10/20 per percentage point). Jack does Pointless!
- The game is no longer episodic, questions played at random (with allowances for question chains to set up gags or whatever – not unlike the original games). Hopefully it will keep track of which questions you’ve done.
- Everybody gets to play Dis or Dat, everyone gets ten seconds to respond to each question.
- The worst performing players at various points are given Screws. These are used to make things harder for their opponents – rather than picking a player out, they now effect all players and have various penalty effects – turning the writing upside down, removing all the vowels and so on. However right now they don’t seem to effect how the question plays out on screen, just on phone, which seems a bit odd. These effect the audience as well!
- The Gibberish question returns, now instead of buzz and answer it’s answer then buzz. Everyone gets to play, it’s on a money countdown timer, they’re currently playing around with the timings. Right now it’s a minute which feels probably a bit too long.
- The Jack Attack has seen an overhaul – there are now six possible responses revealed gradually and more than one of them can be right and you earn credit for each one you hit. It looks like the first person to hit a right answer on their phone earns big money for it with everyone else picking up half if they then select it. It does not look like you can spam wrong answers to end on a minus score. This gets round lag by having all the answers – and their timers – appear on your phone.
- We don’t know how the Audience can play with Dis or Dat, Gibberish or the Jack Attack yet, only that they will be able to.
Only a few months until we can play this for real!