Image: Jackbox Games

You can practically set your clock with Jackbox Party Pack releases now. Every October, another set of casual-but-crude party games rolls out, featuring a new set of silly hosts, daft trivia questions, and unusual minigames for you and your pals to dig into, either huddled around a single screen or streaming to the world, playing through any phone or tablet you have to hand. Today, we've got The Jackbox Party Pack 12, and in it, another five silly ways to enhance your next meeting with your pals.

The five games this time round are We Forgot A Card, in which players pair questionable greeting card art with custom text in order to make (or break) an occasion. MegaPals is probably the chillest of the bunch - a game of word association where your score is based on how much in sync you are with your friends, potentially revealing who you're sharing a brain cell with.

Idol Factions is an almost-serious team game where you're racing to sort words and concepts into the appropriate category bins. Debate and Switch has players arguing for or against silly proposals in a spoken-word debate, ranked by the other players and (if online) the Twitch audience. But the one that has gotten the most laughs from me is Hyperface, where you either pick a stock photo or take a selfie of yourself, and then warp and manipulate using stretch and smear tools to fit prompts given.

The one thing conspicuously missing from this pack is a trivia quiz game - a staple of Jackbox releases. Perhaps it's a recession indicator, but this year they've split it off into a separate game. Trivia Murder Party 3 (sequel to the two prior Jackbox favourites) is currently in early access and pretty solid, but left out all by itself weeks before Halloween just feels wrong. Let that serial killer in!

From the little I got to play of this one pre-release, I don't think this is the strongest Jackbox pack they've put out. MegaPals is an interesting experiment but doesn't have that cartoonish cutthroat edge the best Jackbox games do, and Idol Factions can feel a little dry and mechanical. But it's a decently good time, and still VASTLY better than the 'adult' Jackbox Naughty pack from 2014. Still, Hyperface is the clear winner amongst my usual crowd. It provides the wild freedom for shenanigans of other art-focused games without being an easy win for whoever in your friend group has an art tablet to hand.

The Jackbox Party Pack 12 is out now for £26.75/$30. While there are no discounts (other than some small savings from getting it together with Trivia Murder Party 3), only the host player needs to own the game. The others can either play locally or through streaming, using any tablet or phone as their interface. The pack is compatible with the Jackbox Megapicker app, which lets you browse and jump straight into any games across the whole series you might own.