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It’s funny to think that, despite the cutesy aesthetics and family-friendly appeal, the two longest-running multiplayer Mario franchises seem specifically designed to promote conflict amongst groups of friends. From blue shells to King Boos, Mario Kart and Mario Party have spent decades seemingly committed to fostering as much division among their players as possible–my wife once exclaimed, “I do not love you” when I beat her to the finish line of a flagpole minigame in 2018’s Super Mario Party. We are, as of the time of writing, still together.
Super Mario Party Jamboree–Nintendo’s latest attempt to drive families apart through play–is the third Mario Party game to release on Nintendo Switch, and the first to combine both traditional and motion controls. At a preview event last month, the key word Nintendo used was “more”–more boards, more minigames, more characters, more modes–and as such, there are more ways to drive your loved ones up the wall, too.
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Now Playing: Super Mario Party Jamboree Offers Many More Ways To Fall Out With Your Friends
The nastiest of these is the new Star Steal Trap, an item that turns any chosen space on the board into a veritable landmine, stealing a Star from any player who happens to be unfortunate enough to stop there. This is Mario Party in a nutshell–a game that is, at any given time, simultaneously exhilarating and cruel, glorious and devastating, all at the mercy of a dice roll.
The main offering in Super Mario Party Jamboree is, of course, Mario Party mode. The long-established format of board-game traversal interspersed with minigames remains more or less unchanged from the original offering on the N64 some 26(!) years ago. This time around there are seven boards to choose from, including two returning favorites: Mario’s Rainbow Castle from Mario Party and Western Land from Mario Party 2.
In our demo, we played around 30 minutes (or five rounds) of Mario Party mode on Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party, a new forest-themed board, with one route taking players across a giant sleeping Wiggler at its center. Landing on an Event Space rings a bell that briefly wakes Wiggler from his slumber, sending him charging around in a circle and changing the layout of the board. Items such as special dice and warp pipes return, alongside some new additions, but it’s essentially classic Mario Party as you know and love/hate it.
Also returning is a dedicated minigame mode, this time called Minigame Bay to match Jamboree’s island theme. Here, players can take on various combinations of minigame challenges and playlists, as well as enjoy a Free Play mode for people who want to pick and choose their favorites from the collection of new and returning minigames.
Returning from Mario Party Superstars is a Daily Challenge mode, which collects three minigames in a playlist centered around a theme–we played Minigame Munchies, featuring three food-based minigames, and Master Strategist, made up of games that encouraged tactical thinking. Completing the challenges earned some kind of currency or score called Party Points, but it’s unclear from our preview what these points are used for.
Jamboree also adds two new entries to its suite of modes: Koopathlon and Bowser Kaboom Squad. Though it’s possible to play these modes with CPU opponents, they are clearly designed with online play in mind, though this also means only one player can play per console.
Koopathlon sees 20 players competing to earn coins in minigames to propel their character around a board, with the novel touch that the board progression and minigame play happen simultaneously via a split-screen layout. Though this feels a bit cluttered on-screen, the board essentially acts as a live leaderboard of players ranked by their coin-collecting prowess and can largely be ignored. The overall impression is of a kind of Fall Guys-esque battle royale game shot through a Mario Party lens, though from what I saw, no one gets eliminated, and players are only ever competing indirectly.
Koopathlon’s minigames are specifically designed for that mode and feel a bit slight in comparison to the Mario Party suite of minigames–the three we played included using cannons to collect coins, hopping over spiked poles, and a Temple Run-esque endless runner. After three of these minigames, a special Bowser-themed minigame begins, featuring all 20 players, offering a prize item for victors and a penalty to their board position for losers. The Bowser minigame we played involved carefully jumping over fireballs and, once again, felt slight, though there was at least some chaotic fun in watching all 20 players on-screen at once.
Much stranger is Bowser Kaboom Squad, where eight players work cooperatively to collect bombs and load a cannon, all while avoiding a kaiju-sized Impostor Bowser. After the cannon is loaded, it blasts Bowser and knocks a chunk off his health bar, and players have five 90-second rounds to defeat him. Every 90 seconds, a cooperative minigame offers up the chance to gain items to help the group.
It is an utterly bizarre mode that feels half-baked, with a selection of prefab-looking maps and uncharacteristically clunky movement for a Nintendo game. It’s hard to imagine Bowser Kaboom Squad diverting anyone’s attention from the other modes for very long.
Though, in one sense, it’s admirable that Nintendo keeps adding novel modes to the Mario Party franchise, it’s difficult to understand the value of single-player-per-console modes like Koopathlon and Bowser Kaboom Squad in a Mario Party game. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the core appeal of Super Mario Party Jamboree is in competing with, and screwing over, your friends, preferably when they’re sitting in the same room.
Based on this preview, Super Mario Party Jamboree won’t change anybody’s mind about the franchise. With the right crowd, however, it’s as much fun as Mario Party has ever been, and with seven boards, 20 characters, and over 110 minigames, it looks set to be the most Mario Party for your money on the Switch to date.
Super Mario Party Jamboree launches for Nintendo Switch on October 17.
