Super Mario Party is the new entry in the Mario Party series and one of the newest Nintendo Switch games to be released in the past month. Super Mario Party takes the series back to its routes and adds some extra spice along with it. The game has a variety of game modes in addition to the standard board travelling Mario Party mode. There is River Survival mode, Partner Party mode, Sound Stage, and the online Mariothon game mode.

The standard Party mode has you traversing one of four game boards. The goal is to obtain the most stars through buying them as you travel across the board or through bonus stars awarded at the end of the game by having accomplished a specific goal. Throughout the game, 80 different mini games occur as a way to acquire coins.

The board has a variety of spaces to spice the game up including an ally space giving you an extra die and a computer that will assist you in games and roll a die that boosts the amount of spaces you can travel. The board also has a VS space that triggers a mini game where a specific amount of coins are bet and then given to the winner. The two most influential spaces though are the shop space where you can purchase items that can boost your rolls or lower your opponents and the Lakitu space that for a fee of 30 coins you can steal a star from one of your opponents. The Lakitu space is where most of your coins will go to; the star only costs 10 so most of the coins collected go into the Lakitu.

While the standard Party mode promotes a competitive atmosphere, the Partner Party mode is a game where teamwork is the key. You and a friend have to work together to collect stars across a much larger version of the Party mode boards before the opposing team does. The catch is that you and your partner have to travel the specific amount of spaces you rolled. This makes getting the star much harder as if you roll a number that is too high you will be unable to collect the star. Thus you and your teammate have to coordinate dice rolls and try to get a number that allows you to get the star.

River survival mode is also a teamwork based game that requires four players to use the joycons as paddles as you traverse a river rapid. The goal is to get to the end of the river before time runs out. You can hit balloons along the journey that allow you to play team mini games that allow you to add more time to the countdown. The Mariothon game mode is an online mini game competition that has you competing against people worldwide in a variety of mini games. The final Soundstage game mode is a rhythm and timing based game mode that has you and a group of friends seeing who can keep up in a variety of non-stop rhythm based mini games.

All together Super Mario Party is a fun family friendly romp though a slightly altered Mario party game. The game is solid and can be fun the first few times you play it. However due to a lack of game boards, there only being a total of four in the base game, and a online party mode being inaccessible at the moment, the game is not nearly as pungent as it could be. All in all the game is fun but for sixty dollars it should have more than just a couple of bonus game modes. If you were thinking of purchasing Super Mario Party, I believe you should get it while it’s on sale.