The boards are fun, but still simpler than those of the best Mario Parties ( 5 and 6, for my money). The boards are also less linear than before, with branching paths and an ever-changing end goal as the star space moves around. The more minigames, the merrier, I say.Ībove: A game board in Mario Party mode. This is not how Mario Party 10 worked: It significantly limited minigames to spaces you had to land on.

As you make your way towards spots to purchase stars, the currency of winners in Mario Party, you thankfully end each turn with a minigame. (There’s an option to play with computer-controlled opponents, but I don’t recommend playing by yourself.) The main Mario Party mode has one to four players rolling dice and moving around four board game-like levels with branching paths.

There’s a lot of filler there, too – I would have preferred more focus on the core modes – but there’s enough here to support up to four partiers having a lot of good fun. Party ModeSuper Mario Party is a collection of hit-or-miss virtual board games, broken up by competitive minigames – a few of which are worth your time. But even those painful upsets feel like less of a party killer this time, because Super Mario Party, especially in the team-based Partner Party mode, is competitive, strategic, and, above all, a lot of fun.

It’s done away with some, but not all, of the slowness, you get to play a ton of great minigames with the cool, but not perfect Switch controllers, and that infuriating randomness of awarded stars at the end of a game is … still a problem. Super Mario Party is the best Party in two console generations.

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