For this week’s exploration of judging games I chose to play Tee K.O from Jackbox Party Pack 3. Jackbox games in general are targeted towards a young-adult/adult audience, as its prompts are often a bit raunchy or incentivize more shocking or inappropriate answers.
Tee K.O’s gameplay loop is fairly simple. Players take a period of time to draw out 2-3 different drawings, then submit any number of short slogans. Players are then given a random subset of those drawings and phrases, and they combine one drawing and one phrase to create a T-shirt. These T-shirts are then placed against each other head-to-head tournament format where the winner stays on and faces the next challenger. This process happens one more time, and finally the most successful t-shirts from these two tournaments are placed into another final round, with the winner being declared in this final round.
One large mechanical difference between Tee K.O and other judging games is in its overall lack of creative prompting for players – when drawing, players are not asked to draw a particular subject (though they can press a button to offer them a suggestion), and slogans do not necessarily need to be related to the drawings that they produced. This mechanic helps to create a much wider range of content to work with. There would often be slogans written with no particular drawing in mind that ended up working perfectly with another drawing. This is compounded by the fact that when T-shirts are pitted against each other, the game never asks the players to explicitly compare them based on how fitting the slogan is to the drawing or how pretty a T-shirt is, so any combination has the potential to win. However, it also at times would hamper the play experience: I often found myself paralyzed during the drawing phase, not knowing what to draw and needing to rush together something in the last 30 seconds and create a drawing that wasn’t particularly interesting or usable. No clearly defined judging criteria also meant that players who want to win also need to take into consideration what will appeal most to the play group, something that might be difficult for a group of individuals unfamiliar with each other or for an individual who might be an outsider to a group.
However, I feel that this issue is largely alleviated by another design choice – the way in which Tee K.O heavily de-emphasizes its winners. Winning a round in the tournament doesn’t offer any sort of points towards a win condition, and players are allowed to vote for their own shirts, a mechanic that is not allowed in other judging games like Quiplash. At the end of the game, the winning t-shirt and its creator is displayed, but the artist of the t-shirt and the writer of the slogan are also credited. The credits screen also gives kudos to players who contributed often as either an artist or a slogan writer. In general these design choices help to move the objective away from victory but towards a shared collaborative experience of play and fun where we could collectively create the wackiest possible T-shirt. It contrasted against our group’s later playthrough of Quiplash, in which many players kept constant track of their point totals and individual wins or complained if their answer wasn’t chosen.
Overall I found Tee K.O to be one of the most inviting and easily accessible judging games out there — its mechanics create rich situations for creative expression and wild results, while deemphasizing individuality and victory in favor of a shared sense of play and creation.
