// KOTAKU — GAMING
You Don’t Know Jack Devs Say They Didn’t Plagiarize Board Game: ‘We Intentionally Don’t Share Submissions With Our Game Teams’
Debate and SwitchDie On This Hilljackboxjackbox party pack
Solo board game developer Sam Greszes says Debate and Switch, a game in the recently launched Jackbox Party Pack 12 bears a startlingly close resemblance to his game Die On This Hill, that he sent to Jackbox Games as part of a pitch to turn his board game into a video game. Both Die On This Hill and Debate and Switch are social party games in which players assemble then argue for or against silly debate topics. Both have a audience voting component and both feature the ability to swap out words in the topic to change its meaning. Greszes says that in early 2025, after some back-and-forth communication with Jackbox Games in which they expressed interest in the project, they requested demo of Die On This Hill. After receiving a copy, Greszes said communication with Jackbox petered out only to see a YouTube video announcing Debate and Switch over a year later.
“It feels like a betrayal,” Greszes said, speaking with Kotaku. “Especially of someone who’s grown up with [Jackbox] games and plays them every year.”
Update, October 27, 5:06 PM: Jackbox Games reached out to Kotaku with a statement.
Debate and Switch was conceived and developed by our internal team, without any knowledge of Die on This Hill. Like many studios, we receive a large number of outside pitches and submissions. They go to our business development team, which does not work on party pack games. We intentionally don’t share those submissions with our game teams, precisely so that independent development stays independent. That’s what happened here: the copy of Die on This Hill that Mr. Greszes sent was not shared with or played by anyone on the Debate and Switch team, or played by anyone at the studio. Before Mr. Greszes sent his game, we told him in writing that we develop many pitches internally, that we might already have one similar to his, and that if this was a concern he should not feel any obligation to send it. We have a lot of respect for independent designers, and for the work that goes into making any game. Debate and Switch is the work of our team, and it was created independently.
Greszes said that Die On This Hill came to him out of a desire to make something after getting laid off in 2024. “I had this idea late one night in April of like, ‘What if getting into an argument on the internet was fun instead of making you want to throw your phone out the window?'” He said. In Die On This Hill, players use word cards to put together phrases mad-lib style like, “math paved the way for ketchup” and two participants go head-to-head arguing for or against the topic while the non-arguing players vote for their favorite. Here’s a How To posted on Die On This Hill‘s YouTube page last year.
By summer 2024 he had a working prototype and decided that he would launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds necessary to take the it from prototype to finished game. In November 2024 he launched a Kickstarter and a month later the game reached its funding goal with a little extra to spare.
“The game didn’t make much money for me in profit,” he said, sharing that after paying shipping and production costs he used what was leftover to buy himself a Switch 2. “But the point of the game wasn’t to make me money. It was to make something.” Before physical copies of the game were distributed to backers, Grezes reached out to Jackbox Games. Grezes is local to the Chicago, Illinois area where Jackbox Games is headquartered and said he typically buys every Jackbox Party Pack when it comes out and hosts play parties with his friends. He thought turning Die On This Hill into a video game would get it in even more hands but he didn’t have the technical experience to do it himself.
“They seemed pretty interested,” Greszes said. He said that over the course of two long meetings with Jackbox, they spoke about financials, that Greszes cut from the potential licensing deal would be minimal, and that the video game would