Quiplash is playable with 3-8 players, and from personal experience I found that larger group sizes tend to be better. Up to thousands of people can participate as audience members and vote on answers, though only up to 8 people can actually participate in writing answers.
Quiplash is targeted towards all ages, though likely towards an older audience as there is a manual family-friendly setting, rather than being family friendly by default.
Formal Elements and Types of Fun
- Prompts:
- Before the beginning of each round, players are prompted to answer questions with answers that they think people would want to choose. This contributes to the fun of expression as players are able to express their own senses of humor and creativity.
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- Some prompts actually involve other players in the game– for example, one prompt I have received in the game before was something along the lines of “Say three nice things about [Player Name].” Involving other players in the prompts forces players to consider what they know about the other player, which increases the sense of social fellowship.
- Some prompts can also be quite bizarre, so players might find a sense of challenge in trying to come up with humorous or witty responses.
- Players can also choose to “safety quip,” which provides a prewritten response at the cost of the player winning less points for their win. This incentivizes players to try to come up with something original, but also provides a sense of safety for players who might feel stuck.
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- Procedure and Objective:
- Player answers are then pitted against each other. Players receive points based on the percentage of people (including any audience members) that vote for their answers, as well as a bonus if they get the majority, and an even bigger bonus if they get a unanimous vote (a “Quiplash”). As such, players are motivated to write answers that they think will appeal to the humor of the group, and are motivated to advocate for their own answers each round. This adds to the sense of fun of social fellowship, as players learn more about each other’s sense of humor.
Similar Games
- Fibbage
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- Fibbage is another Jackbox game where players try to come up with convincing fake answers to trivia questions. Players then guess what the right answers are. However, Fibbage veterans, who may have seen most of the questions before and therefore know what the right answers are, or trivia whizzes, are at a distinct advantage at the game, which might make it less fun to play if you have such people in the group. On the other hand, Quiplash is a new experience every time, even if you play with the same group of people, since people are unlikely to repeat answers across games. Also, Quiplash focuses on answers that are funny, rather than trying to fool people into guessing the answer, so there’s less of a focus on “reasonable” answers. While that focus on plausibility in Fibbage isn’t necessarily bad, I feel that it hinders expression.
- Cards Against Humanity
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- Cards Against Humanity is another party judging game where players take turns judging the response cards chosen for a prompt card. While CAH is explicitly 18+, Quiplash humor often leans towards that side of the scale as well. However, CAH relies on set response cards, which can get stale the more times you play the game. Since Quiplash relies heavily on the creativity of the players and uses open ended questions, you run into less of that issue. In that sense, I would say Quiplash enables more expression than CAH.
Vulnerability
Since Quiplash is at its core a judging game, there is a lot of vulnerability in that users must come up with answers that will then be judged by all over players in the group as being “funny” or not. In that sense, users may feel that they or their sense of humor are being judged. However, there’s not really a sense of emotional vulnerability (as opposed to games like Love Language or the harder levels of We’re Not Really Strangers), so this game is suitable to play even with strangers or unfamiliar people.
One pitfall of Quiplash is that there’s the possibility for repeated answers– once the group has found what is funny for them, there’s a chance that the same joke could simply be repeated by every player in the game. In one past game I’ve played, every single answer in the second round of the game turned into a “Go Bears” joke, since people learned that it resonated well with people in the first round. Similarly, there may be tendencies to go for answers with higher shock value, rather than answers that are better fits for the prompt, especially in groups where people are unfamiliar with what others’ senses of humor. I’m not sure what the best way to enforce this programmatically in the game is, but one house rule that might be good to add is to not repeat jokes that have been played in previous rounds.
Overall, I think that the greatest strength of Quiplash is that it’s very simple. The mechanics are straightforward– come up with the funniest answer and get the most points. This makes it easy to play with any group of people, even if you don’t necessarily know each other or the game that well. Since there’s no right or wrong answer, it’s easy to express oneself, and it builds social fellowship as you see other people’s answers and learn more about their sense of humor.
