I thought I was done with Mario Party.
When I reviewed Mario Party Superstars in 2021, I praised the party game and called it a sort of logical conclusion for the series. Its curated nature made it feel like a greatest hits collection that the series could neatly end on if Nintendo chose to do so. It didn’t, and we’re getting another new installment this October in Mario Party Jamboree.
I was skeptical when it was first announced. Does the Nintendo Switch really need a third Mario Party game? Why release this instead of giving the finely tuned Superstars any form of post-launch support. It was easy to write it off from afar, but Mario Party always has a way of winning me over as soon as I pick up a controller. After an hourlong demo showcasing what’s in store this time, I’m ready for one more go around. I’m not expecting a package as perfect as Superstars, but there are enough new ideas here to justify one more trip around the board.
Familiar fun
To start my demo, I’d play the first two rounds of a traditional board game map with other members of the press. I’d get to see both Pauline and Ninji, both playable newcomers to this installment, in action. Our round would take place on one of Jamboree’s new boards, Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party. It’s a classic Mario Party map that’s loaded with gimmicks. There’s a Piranha Plant that eats players coins, and takes more each time it’s activated. Another space lets players collect honey. The key gimmick, though, is that there’s a giant Wiggler at the center of the map. Players can cross over it to shortcut through the map, but another player can land on a space that enrages it and moves its position. I learned that the hard way when my speedrun to the first star was foiled by a route change.
After some familiar dice-rolling and item buying, I got a taste for a few of the package’s new minigames. Most of the ones I tried follow the series’ usual elegant design. Light-Wave Battle had all four of us ground-pounding a button in each of our corners to let out a damaging ring. The goal here was to hop over my opponent’s rings while still trying to let out my own to eliminate them. I also tried one motion-controlled minigame called Arch Rival, a three-on-one battle where one player has to shoot arrows through targets held by the other team and gain 100 points before the timer runs out. The opposing trio can move those targets by swaying the Joy-Con back and forth ro avoid the incoming shots.
I’d try a few more minigames in Daily Challenge mode, where a teammate and I played against another duo in a gauntlet of three minigames. Some ideas felt safe and familiar. A matching game had my teammate and I flipping cards to find a matching image. Another, called Shadow Play, showed us an image and tasked us with recreating it by combining the right shapes. Neither is particularly memorable, but both still elicited the right amount of tension as both teams rushed to outdo one another.
The best minigames I played seemed to take notes from other popular party games, which is perhaps a sign that Nintendo is paying a little more attention to a scene it helped popularize. My favorite was a team-based one that put my partner and I between three conveyor belts that fruit traveled down, not too dissimilar from Overcooked. Each one ended with a box that a specific kind of fruit had to be deposited in. The teamwork twist is that sometimes a fruit that only I could reach would come down a conveyor belt that my teammate couldn’t reach. That turned into a bit of hectic fun as we each rushed to pass fruits over to one another like Lucille Ball trying to keep up with a speedy chocolate assembly line. Creative moments like that quickly reminded me of how fun Mario Party still is when it’s operating at its peak.
New modes
All of that is great, but you can get that experience already in either Mario Party game currently available for the Switch. Jamboree needs to go the extra mile if it’s going to convince players to buy another full-priced installment that’s unlikely to get any kind of post-launch support. On the most basic level, it’s bigger than either Super Mario Party or Super Mario Superstars. It features seven boards (three of which have to be unlocked), including two from previous entries. It also features over 110 minigames – a new series high – with a little over a dozen of those featuring motion controls. There’s also an in-game point system, which unlocks emotes, music, and player card customization options. That already gives it the most bang for your buck.
Jamboree isn’t stopping there, though. It features several creative new modes that look to expand the series beyond its standard board games. Those additions are sure to land differently with each player, but I can already see the appeal in them.
First, there’s Koopathon. The 20-player online mode has players completing different solo-coin collecting minigames as their character moves around a board. The more coins they get from a game, the more spaces they move. The minigames I played here were all fairly simple, but left a lot of room for varying scores. One is a simple whack-a-mole game, where players hit Monty Moles to get coins. Another is a racing game where I need to swerve from lane to lane to get coins. The set of three games repeats itself after each round, but with increasing complexity.
In between those rounds, all 20 players compete at once in a large-scale minigame. The one I tried placed all of us on a floor as pieces of it collapsed from under us. Players slowly got eliminated as they failed to get to safety until one person came out victorious and got a space boost for their troubles. It’s like a game out of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, another sign that Nintendo is taking notes on other popular games. By the end of my demo, I was already trash-talking the other press members playing with me as I got so far ahead that I began to lap them. Jamboree may be bright and breezy, but it still brings out the menace in me, it seems.
The most unique new mode here is Bowser’s Kaboom Squad, an online 8-player co-op mode that’s unlike anything the series has done to date. Here, players run around a tiny city as a kaiju-sized Bowser slowly stomps around. They need to work together to break open boxes full of bombs and transport them to a cannon. Each time players bank 20 bombs, they take a tick off of Bowser’s health. After each round, everyone plays a collaborative minigame and gets items based on how well they do.
Once again, there are some clever games here — and some fairly basic ones. The standout that I saw placed my teammates around a snaking pipe full of leaks. We had to work together to plug those holes as fast as possible, raising our rank the more pipes we fixed. After completing that, I opted to take a banana peel item. When I got back to the bomb-collecting mode, I sneakily placed it right in front of Bowser as he was about to stop my team from cracking open a box. After another round, I grabbed a boost pad and threw it down in a choke point to help my team get to the cannon faster.
I don’t imagine that modes like this will become more popular than the standard board game. Both feel more like the kind of fun, but thin side modes that tend to pop up in every Mario Party game. They’re more curiosities to play with when you don’t have friends nearby but want to play some minigames. Even if that’s the case, they make Jamboree feel like a more robust installment of a series that really needs help upping the ante.
That’s not to say that I’ve totally forgiven Nintendo for failing to capitalize on Mario Party Superstars. The two retro boards included in Jamboree could have easily been thrown into Superstars to expand its paltry roster of boards. But this is a series that’s hard to stay mad at as soon as the screaming and laughing starts. Mario Party Jamboree delivers both, and that’s all I really desire from a new entry.
Mario Party Jamboree launches on October 17 for Nintendo Switch.
