My Game Studies class recently introduced me to play a game called Champ’d Up in the JackBox Games Party Pack 7. It is a competitive game where I have to “fight” with other competitors by drawing characters. It was an incredibly fun experience to play as I really like to draw.
The mechanics of the game is matching, voting, predicting, scoring points, timing, naming, character switching, and the main one is drawing. Every round, I had to draw a character based on the prompt the game gave me, such as “Create The Champion of Travel” or “Create The Champion of Failure.” Each character can be drawn only in two minutes, which makes the game very competitive and addicting. After that, I must draw another character based on another character that my competitor drew without the game’s prompt and name them. This is where predicting mechanics comes in and makes the game very interesting.
After drawing the so-called champion characters, the game turns into a matching game where two competitors send their characters for a match, and the other competitors and audience players will vote which one is more appealing based on the prompt. The voting counts will translate into points, which adds up at the end of the round.
The game has two rounds in total. In the second round, the same mechanics repeat, but this time the competitors can choose the champions for the fight, which can lead to interesting, funny results. If the competitors can win the round with just only one character, they can score very rewarding points, which helped me win the game in the first place.
Having the audience players are very intriguing to me, for they can sway the result in different ways. I personally the audience affects the game too greatly if there are too many audiences. This can lead to unfair results. I wish the game had an option where the host can choose how big is the influence of the audience players in the result. Maybe, the audience votes can have less percentage of influence compared to the competitors’ votes.
On top of that, I think the game is a blast to play. If you have a large group of friends or a club, this game is definitely a must-try. If you have not heard of this game, check this out in this link here.