The Jackbox.TV games all share the following key elements:
- Only the host needs to own the game,
2. Both large and small groups of people can enjoy them, either in person or online
3. There are deliberately placed timers to ensure that the game progresses at a steady pace (they also ensure that if somebody drops out that the game continues)
4. Each of the phases is given enough time to allow for a modicum of skill to be displayed, but not so much as to bore those who are confused during their turn.
5. There are scheduled breaks such that no single player is ever constantly busy.
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and then there is the critical dynamic of the game, which is the developing social meta. For example Drawful 2 is presumably a game about the skill of drawing and then having your fellow players grade how well your drawing emulated your prompt and vice versa. However, Drawful 2 builds upon the 5 core elements of all Jackbox.TV games by instead giving points based on three factors. The first is how many of your fellows you could convince to guess for either the real prompt or for their own fake prompt. The second is how many of your fellows or audience members you could get to like your prompt. The third is that a player is rewarded for guessing the corrrect prompt.
This allows for the development of the following strategies:
-draw something obvious yet completely different than the prompt (such that the guessers can deduce the only odd one out must be the genuine prompt)
-vote for the wrong prompt (to deny the artist points)
-draw a visually confusing prompt that is obvious when reading the prompt (so that the guesser’s prompts are hopefully nonsensical and thus it is obvious what the true prompt is)
-cast aspersions to certain prompts (so that you deny a competitor points)
-make a prompt such that the audience and players will give you likes
-say that one of the prompts is yours (either to throw people off from guessing it if you think that the prompt is genuine, or throw off a competitor as people would be less likely to give you points)
-play to a persona (so that your prompts get the audience likes)
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those are the major mechanics and how the audience affected play
Gaming: review and development 