Games like What The Dub

What The Dub?! is the one everybody finds first: Wide Right Interactive's party game where each player overdubs missing dialogue from old B-movies, outdated public-service films and bizarre industrial clips, and the room votes on the funniest result. Reviewers described it as “MST3K meets Jackbox”, which is exactly the itch it scratches.

If you are looking for more of that — or for the same thing but free, or in a browser — the obvious lists are no help. The auto-generated “games like” pages put Drawful and Quiplash next to it, and those are writing games: the joke is typed, not performed. The dubbing genre is small enough to name every entry in it, so here it is.

What makes something “like What The Dub”

Three things separate the genre from the rest of the party shelf: the material is a video clip, the comedy is performed over it rather than typed, and the room decides whose version wins. Everything below does all three. What differs is the price, the platform, where the clips come from, and whose voice you hear.

What The Dub?! — the one you know

The reference point, and still a good night: a paid download on Steam and consoles, a library of gloriously bad public-domain footage supplied with the game, and a room-code lobby in the Jackbox style. You record your missing line, everybody's version plays back, and the room votes. The two things it will not do are let you bring your own clip and let you play without buying it first.

RiffTrax: The Game — the writing-first sequel

Same developer, same shape, one fundamental change: you TYPE the line and a text-to-speech robot performs it. That makes it a writing game wearing a dubbing game's clothes — the joke lives in the words, and the flat robot delivery is part of the bit. If what you loved was the performing, this is the wrong direction; if what you loved was the writing, it is the right one. Also a paid download, on PC and consoles.

The Choicer Voicer and Voxalike — the pack-based pair

Both play from dub packs: prepared scenes, packaged by the community and shared on sites like GameBanana. Voxalike is free and runs in a browser. The Choicer Voicer is a download for Windows and Linux from itch.io — pay what you want above a $5 minimum — and there is no official browser version of it. Both have you perform the lines yourself over the scene, which makes them the closest in spirit to What The Dub — with the caveat that you play the scenes somebody else prepared, and making your own pack is a hobby of its own. We write the pack-making guides for these two, so read our interest in that ecosystem declared.

PartyDub — ours, so read this accordingly

The one that starts from your own clip rather than a supplied library. The host picks a video off their own device, it goes straight to the other players without touching a server, and everybody re-voices the same scene blind before the vote. It is free, it runs in a browser, and guests join with a six-character code — no account, no install. The honest trade: nobody hands you footage, so somebody has to bring a clip worth doing.

It is also, as far as we can find, the only one where a win can count for something beyond the room: a ranked mode deals every player the same scene and scores the performances by measurement rather than by a show of hands. Every other game on this list settles it by vote alone.

Which one for which night

• —Want polished, supplied movie clips and do not mind paying: What The Dub?! — or RiffTrax: The Game if the writing is the part you love.
• —Want prepared scenes with a modding scene attached: Voxalike, free in a browser, or The Choicer Voicer for $5 or more on itch.io.
• —Want to dub your own clips, with nothing to install and guests who just join: PartyDub.
• —Want the result decided by measurement rather than a vote: PartyDub's ranked mode — the only ladder in the genre we know of.

And if what you actually wanted was the MST3K fantasy — talking back to a bad film with your friends — any of the five will give you an evening of it. The genre could use a sixth.