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.”
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 have to be priced lower than the board game. Greszes says he told them that he didn’t care about that. “I just want the game out there,” he said. “I want people to know I made it.” Greszes said Jackbox requested a demo of the game but was clear that no formal or verbal contract had been made. He didn’t sign anything and Jackbox didn’t either, although Greszes said he tried to get them to but it didn’t work out.
He told Jackbox he was willing to send them a copy of Die On This Hill but asked if they’d be willing to sign an agreement stating that if they decided to make a game based on it, Greszes would be involved. He said Jackbox told him no, and that their declination sounded reasonable to him. In March 2025, when copies of Die On This Hill started going out to backers, one was sent to Jackbox too.
“That’s kind of where that ended,” he said.
After Jackbox confirmed receipt, Greszes said he followed up to hear their thoughts about the game and was told no one had time to play it yet. He got the same message in subsequent follow ups. “I sent like three, maybe four other emails from spring through like winter, and I just figured okay, it’s a no go.”
Greszes said there was no hard feelings toward Jackbox that the project didn’t seem to work out. “It was a moonshot,” he said. “I’m just a guy and Jackbox, they’ve got other things [to do.]”
Like developing Debate and Switch. Jackbox Party Packs come out on a yearly cadence. They feature either wholly new games like Dodo Re Mi or fresh installments of older fan-favorites like Quiplash or Trivia Murder Party. In a 2021 GDC talk, Jackbox CTO Evan Jacover broke down their development timeline explaining that there’s six months of active production during their yearly cycle. Die On This Hill arrived at Jackbox Games in March of 2025, too late for that year’s party pack, but just in time for 2026.
Earlier this week, several months after communication with Jackbox ceased, Greszes said he found a video of Jackbox developers talking about the making of Debate and Switch on YouTube Shorts. He also found a video taken from a stream demoing the game live at Pax West 2026. In the video, players can be seen creating topics by using fill-in-the-blank prompts. Two players debated the topic while the audience voted on their favorite and after a short time, players changed the topic by changing the words of the prompt.
“I’m fucking stunned,” Greszes wrote on Bluesky.
Greszes said he knows there’s probably not much he can do. He understands that one can’t copyright game mechanics and reiterated that he and Jackbox Games did not enter into any kind of contract, legal or verbal. This could all be a misunderstanding born of the convergent evolution that just happens in the gaming industry. Games with similar mechanics, board or digital, happen all the time. He’s not looking for money, he’s not even looking for an apology.
“If if Jackbox got in touch with me and they were like, ‘Hey, we’re making this game. It has some similarities, but we feel we have done enough to differentiate it. We wanted to give you the heads up. We can put you in a special thanks, and we’ll shout at like we’ll promote your game on social media because we think it’s cool, and it was an inspiration to us as we made our game.’ I would have been over the freaking moon,” he said. “I really looked up to them, and being acknowledged by them for this thing that I made […] would have been an honor for me.”
Kotaku has reached out to Jackbox Games for comment.
