This post is long and rambling.
The information contained within may only be of limited use.
The Jackbox Party Pack 4 (I'm just going to assume you roughly know what Jackbox is so I don't have to explain it) is kinda mid. I mean, Bracketeering is good for when you've got more than the traditional Jackbox-mandated player count of exactly eight people and Monster Seeking Monster is interesting with the right group and mindset, but Civic Doodle is underwhelming and Survive the Internet has not been funny with any group I've played it with even a single time. And then there's Fibbage 3.
Fibbage 3 comes in two flavours: regular Fibbage 3, which is an alright trivia game that's made more entertaining by giving you the opportunity to sabotage your own potential to earn points by entering jokes rather than taking the stated goal of fooling other players seriously1, and Fibbage: Enough About You, which is not a very good game2 but is the perfect opportunity to confess things to your friends.
So let's get into it. The game is split into two rounds. In the first, everyone is asked a unique personal question which they are supposed to answer truthfully. Most of the questions are not particularly revealing3, for example:
"Something that blows your mind just to think about it is <BLANK>."
"A song that always makes you dance is <BLANK>."
"What is the most outdated piece of technology you own?"
"What was your favorite TV show when you were 10?"
"If werewolves attacked right now, what would you use as a weapon?"
...though some of the questions just won't apply to everyone, and you're just going to have to improvise if that happens to you, like in the last game I played where someone answered "What are two weird foods you like to combine together?" with "lettuce and air".
After everyone's answered their questions you're taken through each of them in turn, first coming up with a lie for everybody else's questions and then attempting to select the real answer written by the person the question is about out of everybody else's lies. There are points for getting the right answer and for other people picking yours but, look, the points don't really matter.
Nothing hugely exciting ever really happens in the first round, it's not like the answers to any of the questions are ever going to be huge reveals or dark secrets, but honestly, I think it's better this way. It means the game doesn't make you reveal anything dramatic when you don't actually want to. Even if your question happens to be one you don't want to answer honestly, you can still answer some variant of "I'd rather not say" without breaking the game because "I'd rather not say" is always a good lie.
The first round is fine, but it's mostly just an appetizer for the second round, which is incredible. With absolutely no prompt you enter ONE TRUTH and ONE LIE about yourself, and everybody else has a short time to guess which is which.
It's hard to describe why exactly this is so good. The obvious thing is that this basically already exists, it's called "two truths and a lie" and it's just terrible, it's an awful experience 100% of the time.
Maybe what makes the second round of Fibbage: Enough About You good is what it improves from two truths and a lie? First of all that three statements is clearly too many and two is better, but also the presentation. Rather than you reading your statements out, the game puts them both on-screen at once, dramatically improving the pace by giving your friends the opportunity to immediately make all sorts of confused noises and giving you the opportunity to sit back and enjoy them.
Probably just as important is the context around the game. Two truths and a lie is a horrible icebreaker. I don't know of anybody who ever plays it by choice; you're always sort of coerced into doing it, probably immediately after being introduced to the people you're with, and now you've got to come up with things that are interesting enough that it doesn't look like you don't care but also things you actually want these people you just met to know, and you're probably not given a lot of time to do that so you're going to going to get upstaged by the three people here who've got two truths and a lie just memorised so they can pull them out in exactly this situation, and need I remind you that this is like, your first impression on all these people, and they're going to think you're super boring because you haven't even survived a shark attack or been struck by lightning, and everybody else has.
...
People who run icebreakers need to be stopped. Anyway, my point here is that Fibbage: Enough About You is not good if you're playing it with people you don't know. The game's design improves on two truths and a lie on its own, but you must adhere to two more rules in order to make it actually good:
- You must be playing with people you already know and are comfortable around. Preferably good friends.
- You must give everyone proper warning of what's coming. Anyone who doesn't know what happens in Fibbage: Enough About You must have the second round explained to them before the start of the game at the latest. But if you ask me, you should do this hours or even days before the game. The truth and lie you put down in the final round are going to be so much better if you have time to prepare them.
If you do this, the second round of Fibbage: Enough About You ascends beyond being a party game or bad icebreaker into a confessional. There is no better time, place, or method to make a dramatic reveal of some piece of personal information than by the game presenting it alongside something equally dramatic and making your friends guess which one is true. For just a few seconds, either outlandish thing could be real, and that makes the reveal feel so much more natural when it happens.
And the beauty of it is, you don't have to reveal anything you don't want to. You're the one putting in the truth and the lie, and you can always just put down what you had for breakfast that morning. The fact that you're not obligated to do anything dramatic keeps the atmosphere at an overall level of chill; it remains, always to some extent, just a party game, and that means that the conversation doesn't need to suddenly become very serious when somebody drops a wild confession into it - and besides, you wouldn't reveal something via a Jackbox game of all possible methods if you didn't want the reveal to stay lighthearted.
Or maybe you're just going to put something dramatic in there as an agent of chaos. I sometimes joke that Fibbage 3 is cursed for how it induces people to, entirely unexpectedly, reveal dramatic backstories nobody expected them to have. Somehow this keeps happening in games of ordinary, non-Enough About You Fibbage 3 too. It's weird.
I'm not going to say that Fibbage: Enough About You is the best Jackbox game (because it's Bomb Corp4), but no other game I've played has led to such meaningful post-game discussion. People talk about some games as "friendship-ruining" - it's almost a term of advertisement for some weird party games - but Fibbage: Enough About You might just be one of the few truly friendship-improving games. It's funny that a game which so wants you to believe it's about lying is truly, more than anything, about telling the truth.
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Honestly I just think regular Fibbage 3 is like a worse version of Drawful
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Not that most Jackbox games are actually meant to be "good games", really. The scoring is just there to give you a task to complete in the hope that attempting to complete that task will funny. Except Bidiots, the only Jackbox game where the points mean something. Sort of.
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I've never played with family-friendly mode off, but from what I can tell from the code, it only disables five prompts, and just to give you an idea, one of them is "One of the most embarrasing places you ever farted was <BLANK>.", so they're not very exciting either.
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Though you need exactly four players, you need to play in person, and you need to believe in yourselves, Bomb Corp goes beyond being the best Jackbox Game and was honestly one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time. I suggest playing without the new "retry" feature and instead restarting the entire day whenever you die. Seriously.