Games like Jackbox: what to play when nobody owns the Party Pack

Somebody in the group knows Jackbox, somebody else has heard about it, and then comes the awkward part: the pack costs money, it lives on one person's computer, and that person is not in the room tonight. So you start searching for games like Jackbox, and you land in a pile of listicles that never say the two things you actually need to know: what does it cost, and how many of us can play.

This is that list, written by someone who runs these nights for a living. Every game here is grouped by what it really is, not by how it markets itself, and I flag the catches: player caps, ads, accounts, and the ones where a single person still has to buy something. At the end you will find the format I build my own evenings around, which is a TV as the stage and phones as the buzzers.

Why people look for a Jackbox alternative in the first place

The Jackbox Party Pack 11 arrived on 23 October 2025 and sells for 29.99 dollars, the same as the packs before it. That is a fair price for five games, and it is also the exact reason people search for something else: nobody wants to buy a party pack at 9pm because friends dropped by unannounced.

The second reason is where it lives. Someone in the room needs the pack running on a PC, a console, an Apple TV or through Netflix, with that screen on the TV. If the host is on a laptop with no HDMI cable, the night is over before it starts. The third reason, and the biggest one outside English-speaking countries, is language: the games are written in English, and half the humour is wordplay.

Three different things people mean by a Jackbox-style game

Before the list, sort out what you are actually after, because these three wishes lead to completely different games.

• The format: one shared screen, everyone playing from their own phone, no gamepads. This is the part that makes a party work with people who never game.
• The humour: writing your own answers and watching the group vote for the funniest lie. Quiplash and Fibbage built a whole genre on it.
• The zero effort: nobody explains rules, nobody installs anything, a new guest can walk in during round two and still join.

Free browser games where your phone is the controller

These run in a browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing to sideload onto a smart TV. What differs is the player cap and how much of it is really free.

• Gartic Phone: the drawing telephone game, free, two to thirty players, no account. The closest thing to Drawful energy and the one I open first when the group is large.
• skribbl.io: draw and guess, free, private rooms with your own word list. Simpler than Gartic Phone and easier for kids and grandparents.
• AirConsole: turns a browser into a console and phones into gamepads. The free games are limited to two players and come with ad breaks, the Hero subscription starts around 2 dollars a month and unlocks the rest.
• Kahoot: fine for a quick trivia round, but the free tier now caps a live game at roughly ten players, and that cap has been cut more than once. Check it before you build the evening on it.
• Buzzin: a full game show on the TV, phones as buzzers, nothing to install. More on that below, since it is the one I build.

Buzzin: a game show on your TV, and nothing to install

Buzzin is the format from the top of this article taken literally. The TV is the stage: host, categories, questions, the leaderboard, all the game show glitter. Phones are the console: four answer buttons, votes, tricks to slow a rival down. There is no app for the TV and no app for the players, because everything runs in a browser.

One TV and that is it. That sentence is the whole product. A guest who arrives late scans the code and is in the next round, which is exactly the thing that breaks in every alternative built around a per-player install.

1. 1Open the TV browser, or plug in a laptop, and go to the game.
2. 2The room code and a QR code show up on the big screen.
3. 3Everyone points a phone camera at it and picks a nickname.
4. 4The host reads the first question and the phones turn into buzzers.

If it is the Jackbox humour you miss

The write-your-own-answer genre is the hardest to replace, because the joke depends on the group, not the game. A few things get close.

Gartic Phone covers the drawing half: your sentence becomes someone's drawing, that drawing becomes someone's sentence, and by round five it is unrecognisable. For the writing half, the browser Quiplash clones come and go, so treat any single one as temporary and check that it is still up before the guests arrive. On Steam, Use Your Words plays in the same key and goes on sale often, but you are back to one person owning a copy.

When the group is scattered: playing over a call

Remote nights change the maths. There is no shared screen in the room, so someone shares one over the call, which adds a delay of a second or two. Anything that depends on reflexes falls apart, and anything turn-based survives.

Gartic Phone and skribbl.io work almost unchanged, since every player already has their own browser window. Codenames-style word games work well because the delay does not matter when people are thinking anyway. Buzzer-race trivia is the one thing I would not run over a call: whoever has the better connection wins, and everyone can feel it.

How to pick for the group you actually have

• Four to six people who know each other: the writing games, where the joke is about your friends.
• Eight to twelve at a party: a shared screen and phones, because everyone must be able to join mid-round without a tutorial.
• Mixed ages, kids and grandparents at the table: drawing and guessing, no time pressure, no typing races.
• A team offsite: trivia with a scoreboard on the big screen, because a visible leaderboard does more for a room than any icebreaker.

The best party game is not the funniest one. It is the one your least technical guest can join in twenty seconds.

What I would skip

• Anything that asks every guest to install an app and create an account. You will lose the room while people hunt for their store password.
• Games that need a gamepad per player, unless you already own four.
• Smart TV store games, which are usually locked to one brand and rarely built for a group.
• Any recommendation that does not tell you the player limit. That is the number that decides whether the evening works.