What you're getting
The Jackbox Party Pack 8 bundles five party games made by Jackbox Games, Inc. Everything runs in English. Players don't need extra controllers: everyone joins from a phone or tablet through a web-enabled device. The pack supports up to 10 players and up to 10,000 audience members, and the group size changes depending on which game you pick. Genre-wise it sits in casual, indie and strategy territory, with a light, colorful cartoon look throughout.
The five games
Drawful Animate takes 3 to 10 players and revives the drawing-and-guessing format, except now you build a looping two-frame animation from a weird, random title and everyone else tries to name it. The Wheel of Enormous Proportions runs 2 to 8 players: a big mystical wheel poses trivia prompts, winners collect slices of the Wheel's face, and one player gets their most burning question answered at the end. Job Job fits 3 to 10 players and hands you other people's words to assemble answers to classic job interview questions, then scores who gets the job. The Poll Mine takes 2 to 10 players: you split into teams, rank your own choices to a difficult question, then guess how the whole group answered in order to escape the witch's lair. Weapons Drawn needs 4 to 8 players and is a social deduction game where everyone is both a murderer and a detective, doodling clues that hide a letter from their own name inside the weapon drawings.
Getting a group together
There's no online matchmaking built in, so you set up the session yourself. Share your screen on a video call and have everyone open the game on their own phone or tablet to play along. Tools like Zoom, Steam Broadcast, Google Hangouts and Discord all work; the store notes to look for prompts so you share audio as well as video. The same approach works for a couch group, since phones double as the controllers.
Before you start
Check the player count for the game you want: Weapons Drawn is the strictest at 4 to 8 players, while The Poll Mine and Job Job both stretch to 10. Only Drawful Animate and Job Job reach the full 10-player lineup, so plan around who's actually coming. Everyone needs a web-enabled device, and since the pack is English-only, keep that in mind for your group.