Junktopia is a joke-driven writing game where you win by building funny backstories for unusual objects, the fourth game to be announced for The Jackbox Party Pack 9, revealed on June 24th, 2022.
Gameplay[]
In Junktopia, the wizard Nikolas Knackalus has turned all of the players into frogs! (Before you start, you get to choose a cute hat as identification.) He's agreed to poof one of you back to normal IF you can make the most money selling antiques for him. But you'll need to give the object a funny name and backstory; he thinks most of these items have very boring ones by default.
At the beginning of each round, he'll take all of the frogs to a store to shop for an item. Players get a choice of three items, each with their own price ranges. You can choose to buy the item for its price or haggle for a slightly lower price (which may or may not work). Once everyone has their items, they create their funny backstory by giving it a name and two facts.
The host can turn on Auto-Presentation to let the game present the items automatically, or let the players manually read out the facts themselves with Manual Presentation. (Auto-Present is still an option in Manual Mode, and this can be decided from the lobby.) Manual is recommended for voice-chat calls, while Auto is recommended for streams.
Once all the players have made their funny item stories, they present them to the party! If the party is 3-5 players, it'll be done in one group, but 6-8 players will have it split in half (3/3. 3/4, and 4/4 respectively). After a party or party group finishes, they appraise the itmes by voting on which items made them laugh the most. For every vote, that player will get $1000 from the other players and $10 per 1% of the audience. The payment total is subtracted from their appraisal and the rest is added to your score!
This goes on for two rounds, and the final third round sees you putting your two items together to form a set, which you name! Once you named your sets, every one of them is presented and voted on. Each vote gets $1000 added to that frog's total, and after the round is over, the winner is declared... and then subsequently turned back into a human!
Promotional Art[]
Trivia[]
- Despite the host's very antagonistic behavior towards his players (doing the wizard equivalent of mutilation and extortion), Nikolas Knackalus is not considered an antagonistic host by his game like [REDACTED], L'averne Caverne, or The Narrator are for theirs.
- Nikolas' name is a play on the word knick-knack, a term used for small, usually worthless objects, usually household ornaments.
- Fibbage 4 directly references this game with a comment about exploding toads.