Despite the early March snowstorm that blew through on the 3rd, cancelling many weekend events on the 4th, the Tabletop and Video Games Club still hosted their Jackbox event through Discord, an online chat service that allows its users to join video calls where a specific host (in this case TVGC President Leo Skoble and Secretary Brennan Eckman) is in control of the game that appears on screen. 

 In a campus community that is transitioning out of the Covid-induced online spaces of a few years ago, it is still pertinent to have online infrastructures in case of unexpected events. The event was sparsely attended with only around a half dozen participants, but the fun was underway. 

Jackbox is the catch-all name for a pack of various party games that have the participants filling out select prompts on their mobile phones which are then sent into the game for all other players to view. The games mostly center around words and trivia.  

The three games available to the participants of the event were Fibbage (players attempt to fool each other with lies to provided questions with one player’s answer being correct and earning the most points), Joke Boat (players create jokes based on a template and whoever gets the most votes wins) and Dictionarium (players create definitions to a given word, then a synonym and then a sentence with the synonym, whoever gets the most points over three rounds wins).  

The mood was casual throughout but that didn’t stop the participants from laughing over the funniest answers and sometimes struggling to come up with answers in time to have them be entered in. Some of the best responses were from participants who didn’t enter in their ideas fast enough, resulting in half words, left field punchlines and at one point a stoic letter “h” waiting to be voted on. 

Throughout the many rounds participants created new words and used them in sentences, creating the atmosphere of a cursed spelling bee. They ruminated on how difficult it is to write good jokes when under pressure, at a juncture when one’s head becomes empty, and no comedy gold can be mined from it.  

They also learned a surprising amount of real-life facts that left many stunned and then doubly so when some of the participants knew the answers to the questions seemingly out of nowhere. The spontaneity of the prompts and the wide variety of answers generated by the participants created a space where boredom did not exist. Everyone put forth good answers, even if they had to bend their brains to make sense of some of them. 

The Jackbox event highlighted the need to still have an online presence for club activities here on campus. In-person events are always preferred especially after the forced isolation of covid lockdowns, but from how much fun still went down at the Jackbox event it proved that students can still come together and bond over a bit of lighthearted party games.  

While they may have wanted to meet in person, those at the TVGC weathered the storm of March 4th and created an alternative that still brought a group of students together in a positive way.