The Jackbox Party Pack Five games, one phone each

The best part of a game night is usually the part before the game: nobody wants a tutorial. Here there isn't one. One person starts a game on the big screen, everyone else opens a browser on their phone or tablet, types in the room code, and they're in. Any device with a browser works, so the friend with the ancient phone plays just as well as the one with the newest gadget. No controllers to untangle, no explaining which button does what. The game shows a prompt on the TV, you answer on your phone, and that's the whole lesson.

The pack holds five different games, so a group can change the mood without changing the couch. YOU DON'T KNOW JACK 2015 is a snarky trivia quiz show for 1 to 4 players, with hundreds of questions and wrong answers that cost you money. Fibbage XL (2 to 8 players) is about lying: a strange question appears, everyone writes a convincing fake answer, then everyone tries to spot the truth among the lies. Drawful (3 to 8 players) hands you a bizarre phrase to draw on your phone, badly, while the others guess what on earth it is. Word Spud is a fill-in-the-blank word game, and Lie Swatter is quick true-or-false trivia for up to 100 players at once.

For a party, this pack does the one thing that matters: it gets everyone playing within a minute. Rounds run about ten to fifteen minutes, so nobody is locked into a long session and there's always time for one more. The humor comes mostly from the players themselves: your lie in Fibbage, your terrible drawing in Drawful, the answer that makes the whole room groan. Each game has an announcer who explains the rules and cracks jokes along the way. And because the prompts stay clean while your answers don't have to be, the same game fits a family evening or a rowdier crowd.

The games are built for a group in one room, but the same phone-as-controller setup works at a distance. Everyone joins on a web-enabled device as usual, and you share your screen over a video call, so a friend in another city draws and lies along with everyone at the table. Lie Swatter takes up to 100 players, which makes it an easy fit for a big online gathering where half the people have never met. It's co-op and competition mixed: sometimes you're all laughing at one drawing together, sometimes you're actively trying to trick each other out of points.