Mario Party tends to elicit a range of emotions. Some who have been raised on its particular brand of Star-grabbing, minigame-fueled chaos love the randomness and friction — the feeling that, at any point, a comical series of errors can send you from first to last place or vice versa. Others find it maddening. If any Party was going to sway some hearts, I think Super Mario Party Jamboree might have a shot.
Super Mario Party Jamboree arrives as the third series entry on the Switch. The first, Super Mario Party, was innovative yet divisive, and its follow-up, Mario Party Superstars, was nostalgic but felt a little safe, focusing on the staples of boards and minigames. The legacy of these two predecessors is tangible in the third: Super Mario Party Jamboree feels like it’s learned the good and bad from both Super and Superstars.
In its board game play, Super Mario Party Jamboree keeps the core Mario Party mechanics focused. Players take turns rolling the dice and moving around the board, and every turn is punctuated with a minigame. Get the most Stars, and you win. While every match starts slow, it gradually escalates as more items and events get thrown into the mix, resulting in surprise, chaos, and sometimes huge swings in the race for the top.
There’s a wide roster of characters, from Mario staples to goofy little guys like Spike, Ninji, and my personal favorite, Monty Mole. There are seven boards, with five new layouts and two returning boards in Mario’s Rainbow Castle and Western Land. Each is pretty solid, with some really great individual board mechanics.
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Roll ’Em Raceway, for example, is a racetrack with a fantastic lap mechanic and some really fun Turbo Dice that make racing for the most-spaces-traveled Bonus Star highly competitive. Goomba Lagoon was a surprise hit in local multiplayer; its rising and ebbing tide can create sequestered pockets on the board, forcing players to use more of movement items like Pipes and Warp Blocks if they don’t want to stay stranded. And on the classics front, Western Land is still just as good as I remember from my N64 days. They’re not all bangers, but the board quality is generally above average.
One welcome revision is how Jamboree revises the ally system from Super Mario Party. Now, when a random Mario character drops onto the board as a potential helper, you only have to pass them, much like a Star. Once you do, a minigame starts to win their loyalty, with the passing player getting a small advantage for getting there first.
These specific minigames are a highlight of Super Mario Party Jamboree. Speedrunning puzzle rooms to save Luigi from a spooky mansion or playing Waluigi’s predictably over-the-top, self-aggrandizing pinball machine are a blast against computers or friends alike. Others are just a few normal minigames strung together, but nonetheless a fun activity for an ultimately huge reward.
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Jamboree Buddies are potent in Super Mario Party Jamboree and can radically swing the balance of the game. Having an ally nets you their passive ability, as well as double everything; two rewards from spaces, buying two items at the shop, even the chance to get two Stars from a spot instead of one. The buddies are also fickle as hell, leaving you for a passing player the second one runs by. It’s not strange to get an ally, then see them immediately stolen by a passing player.
Thanks especially to the double-Star mechanic, your chances of winning can swing drastically in Super Mario Party Jamboree. Comeback mechanics do exist, whether through items or just having a Boo go steal some coins or a Star, but I’ve had a few games where players jumped out to a very early lead and held it all the way to the end.
There are some ways of toning down the randomness, though. The new Pro Rules option cuts out most of the randomness and constricts Mario Party into something that feels, I daresay, strategic. Items have limited stock in shops, players vote on minigames, and random chance slots only offer specific options you choose, to name a few. Heck, even the Boo that steals coins just takes a set amount, rather than instigating a fight between the ghost and the chosen player.
It’s an interesting take on Mario Party, though I found the Pro Rules to be a bit more of a novelty rather than something I’d totally swap over to using all the time. While regulating the chaos is interesting in its own way, and I liked some of the settings enough to move them over to my normal Mario Party setup (voting for minigames is really nice), I just love the classic chaos too much.
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
What’s really surprising about Jamboree is how much it offers outside of the main boards. There are a few different defined minigame options, whether it’s the classic Minigame Bay or other, sometimes strange side activities given their own bespoke party island in the rotunda. Toad’s Item Factory is a neat little puzzle collection where players move their Joy-Cons to operate machinery and, eventually, construct the items that they can buy on a Mario Party board. Playing in a group could be fun, but take it from me: Soloing this whole section by yourself is like doing the pat-your-head-rub-your-tummy bit after a while.
Paratroopa Flight School feels torn out of a different game entirely, letting players hold their Joy-Cons out perpendicular from their bodies and turn the Mario brothers into Daedalus and Icarus, soaring around in either competitive or co-operative modes. It’s fun, but the novelty wore off fast. Might not be bad as an alternative arm workout for Ring Fit folks, though. And Rhythm Kitchen puts a cooking competition spin on beat-driven partying, tasking you with flipping flapjacks and spicing sauces to the rhythm. Most of these feel a little bizarre for a Mario Party game, almost like cast-off 1-2-Switch concepts, but they’re neat gimmicks for groups that don’t want to compete with each other.
The meatier side options in Super Mario Party Jamboree are the Koopathlon and Bowser Kaboom Squad. In the former, up to 20 players race around a course, completing quick minigames to advance. It’s absolutely frantic at times, and it was a blast. I could see this being a more go-to option for someone who wants a quick online bout, rather than a full board run.
Bowser Kaboom Squad, meanwhile, has players working together to feed bombs into a cannon and take out a rampaging Impostor Bowser. More co-op options are always welcome, and dodging the angry Bowser as he rained fire and stomped around was frantically fun. I could see this working well for parties where people don’t want to worry about winning or losing, and just want to work together to take down Bowser — a cooperative feeling that Mario Party doesn’t always elicit.
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Tie in a decent, if short, solo tour of the new game boards in the single-player Party Planner mode, and Super Mario Party Jamboree is stuffed to the gills with things to do. Past Mario Party games have sometimes felt drawn between two ideas: playing the hits that made Mario Party the chaotic, exciting party game it was, and doing something fresh with a decades-old concept. Jamboree, by both quality and quantity of offering, has managed to do both.
There is a lot to do, but that doesn’t mean it takes a particularly long time to see it all. Many of these side games and solo modes can be finished in a couple hours. Rather, it feels like Jamboree wants to make sure that, no matter what kind of party you’re bringing it to, you’re bound to find something in here that people will be down to play. Get competitive with a standard Mario Party board, or just mess around with some fun minigames in the Bay. Chop up some vegetables to get everyone moving and laughing, or take down Bowser in a cooperative PvE effort.
The expanded number of boards and modes, and the solid roster of characters, are likely already enough to make Super Mario Party Jamboree one of the better options for playing these chaotic board games on the Switch. And nothing really gets lost in the pile, either. Some modes might feel a bit thin after half a dozen hours, but they’ll still be good fun to break out for new players now and then. Jamboree is something I’ll likely keep installed on my Switch for a while, just so I always have it at hand.
If this is the last big party for the Nintendo Switch, then it’s a fitting send-off. Super Mario Party Jamboree has many ways to keep the party going, for as long as the Switch is still showing up at parties.
Super Mario Party Jamboree was released Oct. 17 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
