At Netflix’s offices in Hollywood, California, I sat on a couch in front of a TV and tried frantically to guess words, build Legos and finish Tetris lines faster than my rivals seated around me. The streaming service has a range of new games playable on your TV that require only your smartphone for control, Jackbox-style.
That gives Netflix’s party games a leg up on the competition. While games from the Jackbox Party Pack series, alongside Mario Party, Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., have dominated the party game genre, they all require consoles or nearby PCs to play on big family room TVs. That’s fine when you’re at home, but what about when you’re at a friend’s apartment or traveling? It’s a lot easier to access Netflix’s games by logging into its app on whichever TV you’re in front of. Then, all you have to do is scan a QR code on your phone and use it as your controller.
Connecting phones to the service requires some effort. iPhone owners will need to download an additional Netflix Game Controller app from Apple’s App Store, which will remain connected after scanning a QR code before the first match. Android phone owners can play through the standard Netflix app, but must scan a QR code each time they start a game.
Netflix has five party games available now, offering a respectable spread of game types to ensure that one player’s strengths don’t dominate their friends. In my couch preview time, none of us were roundly beating the others. There was a good amount of friendly trash talk and squeals of delight or dismay as games went one way or the other.
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My standout favorite was Lego Party — an abridged version of the recently released game of the same name that does away with the Mario Party-esque game board, and (smartly) throws players straight into a best-of-five mini-game blitz.
Tetris Time Warp is a competitive Tetris that you’ve probably played before, but with a fun twist of switching graphics to match different eras of the game. In the middle of a match, mine switched to greenscale like the original Game Boy version.
Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends is the most Jackbox-like game, where a group of players describe an animal with a word, though one is an imposter and tries to fake their way through.
Pictionary is just like the classic game we know and love, while Boggle Party gives players a grid of letters where they try to make as many words as they can in a limited time. (I assumed I’d dominate this one until stressing about the rapidly dwindling timer shrunk my vocabulary.)
There’s another game coming soon, Dead Man’s Party: A Knives Out Game, which will be a murder mystery and social deduction game themed after the third detective film in the Knives Out series, set to be released later this month. While Netflix didn’t specify when the game will be released, Wake Up Dead Man is slated for a Nov. 26 release.
This party package is a departure for Netflix, which had focused on single-player games for kids and adults playable through its app. To be clear, the streaming service is still expanding its library of non-party titles, with a mobile version of Red Dead Redemption set to arrive soon.
