This week, I played Tee K.O. by Jackbox Games, as a part of their Party Pack 3. Party Pack 3 is available on many platforms, from PC/Mac/Linux, to consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Playstation 4. These are the platforms where the games can be hosted from, but to join, only one person needs to own the Party Pack, and most devices that can access a web browser can join, with a common option being to join from one’s smartphone. The target audience of this game is to be a party game, so this includes players 10 and older. The games can target this wide of a demographic with their relatively open-ended prompts, where the players’ inputs determine how appropriate (or in my friends’ case, inappropriate) the content of the games is. On the other side, the games use cute cartoonish characters and bright characters to help capture and keep the attention of the younger players they’re targeting. The directions for the games are also quite simple, allowing children who have likely grown up in the era of smartphones and iPads to pick up on how to play quickly.
Tee K.O. would fall under the Judging category for this week’s critical play. It supports anywhere from 3-8 players, but there are an unlimited number of audience members who can join and participate in the voting process (I’ve seen the “audience” system leveraged when streamers play the game, so their viewers can still take part in the game). Gameplay is as follows: Players all draw images for shirts within a time limit, give as many captions as they can within a shorter time limit, then there’s a short “construction” phase where players are assigned a random selection of others’ drawings and captions and try to match them up to make the funniest shirt they can. Then, there’s a voting round, followed by another shorter draw-caption-construct-vote phase, finishing with a “battle of the best” voting round where the streak and overall winners of each round are pitted against each other. One thing I found interesting about the relationships between players and the resulting resources is that you can’t actually use the drawings and captions that you contribute, and rather, the “constructor” is the only person who gets credit until the very end, where the caption and art are credited if that shirt is the overall winner. However, due to everyone’s desire to have a fun time with the game, as well as due to the fact that the game doesn’t move on until everyone’s finished drawing, people generally try to put their best effort in when creating their drawings, since if they finish early, they just need to wait for everyone else anyway. However, one thing that my group needed to instate was a “house rule” of no single-letter captions, because one rogue player would end up spamming the caption box, which resulted in players getting more low-quality captions that overall hindered the entertainment value of the game. Every voting round is a 1v1, so the game isn’t necessarily “fair,” because shirts that appear earlier on have a much lower chance of surviving the entire gauntlet, especially in the way that novel, “shock value” shirts can steal the spotlight for a round. To balance this, there is a “streak winner” for every round of voting as well, but the overall winner is the final “gauntlet winner,” rather than having a “honorary mention” for the streak winner at all. To improve or at least change the game up, one interesting option would be to turn on “bracket mode,” to change the type of voting and remove streak winners, since sometimes players would complain about the unfair voting system when their shirts came up earlier in the gauntlet.
Tee K.O. leverages Fellowship as a type of fun by having people play with each other and form bonds by voting on each other’s creations (which another player had a significant part in creating). It also leverages Expression, in that players must find the “funniest” or “best” ways of expressing themselves to their “captive audience (i.e. the other players in the group). Finally, Tee K.O., as well as many other Jackbox party games, leverage fun as pasttime: Submission. These are games that can be picked up and played without any advance notice or setup (other than perhaps gathering the group of players), and rounds are short enough to not be a daunting time commitment. But if players decide they want to go for multiple rounds, this is also completely viable!
In Tee K.O., players are not required to get vulnerable at all, but since the prompts are quite open-ended, technically players can also get as vulnerable as they want. However, since entries are usually judged based on how funny they are, rather than answering a specific prompt or asking questions of the other players, usually players don’t get any more “vulnerable” past perhaps incorporating the odd inside joke. However, one important facet of judging games is to make sure one is on the same “wavelength” as the other players, especially in terms of the humor or “inappropriateness” of the content that people create. This is how Tee K.O differs from other games in its category such as Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, where the content on the cards is fixed — players generally know how “spicy” the game will get based on which of these two games they pick up, if they are both options.
