Between 20 and 30 games are seriously considered for inclusion in each Party Pack, and about 70 percent of those games go through some kind of prototyping process. The team is grinding away at the Jackbox Party Pack 5-the latest iteration of what has become the company's flagship product, with a new version arriving each fall. (IвЂ™m 15 minutes into a friendly conversation with Spencer Ham, director of the Party Pack 5 game Split the Room, when he casually reveals that he voiced the sadistic, Jigsaw-like host of the Jackbox game Trivia Murder Party.) ItвЂ™s only when you take a closer look that you might notice the little trappings that mark this space as the Jackbox office: the bookshelves stuffed with dozens of board games, or the two standing arcade units, or the glow-in-the-dark cups designed as a jokey tribute to founder Harry Gottlieb, or the little recording booth where the gameвЂ™s voiceover artists-many of them Jackbox employees pulling double duty-work their magic.

Heads pop up when I arrive, but within a few minutes everyone is back to typing away at their keyboards. You could mistake the Jackbox offices for pretty much any office block in the country: a semi-open floor plan of desks and computers where people are quietly and diligently typing away. All of them encourage heated rivalries with your friends. Some games make you a know-it-all some games make you a comedian some games make you a liar. ItвЂ™s hard to summarize your average Jackbox Party Pack game-there are 25 and counting-but the basics are roughly the same: an eclectic mix of trivia and wordplay that implicitly nudges the player to be as crass and clever as possible. ThatвЂ™s the annual task for the team at Jackbox Games, a company whose annual Party Pack-downloadable on computers, video-game consoles, smart TVs, and anywhere else they can make it work-has become the definitive party game of this generation. And imagine that your intended audience is, uh, everybody in the world, probably several beers deep. So imagine coming up with not one but five new party games every year.

Even decades-old standbys like Charades and Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit get played out of tradition or duty-and not because theyвЂ™re, you know, fun. Nothing kills a good time like thumbing through a rulebook to figure out what happens when you roll two sixes, or when your drunk uncle and his new wife get into a messy fight over whether her drawing looks more like a battery or an eggplant.

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