Games are supposed to be fun, whether it is in card, board, or video format. They bring people together in providing a pleasant combination of escape and competition. Sometimes, however, a game will come along draped in the deceit of promising a good time while simultaneously preparing to bring forth great agony with the pain of random fuckery and the rending of relationships. This is why Nintendo’s Mario Party games are wholey a-holey.

Regardless of version, Mario Party games are packaged in the bright palette of Nintendo franchises, making use of the themes and characters from Mario to Donkey Kong. They promise a bubbly playtime with friends, as a smiling Toad and Toadette guide you through the rules and around the game boards. Turns are capped with minigames that try to balance skill and chance. Mario Party foretells of an enjoyable experience brimming with laugh and cheer. Once you start playing, however, something starts to feel amiss.

Super Mario Party for the Nintendo Switch is the latest iteration in the franchise, so we are going to focus on that fucker. Once again, the game is cheery and colorful. All the familiar faces are there like Mario, Peach, and Bowser. There are even multiple play modes with various unlockables to provide a broader experience beyond the traditional Mario Party board game format, so you feel optimistic that, regardless of past experiences, this new version will provide endless fun. Hold up, you fool; this is a Mario Party game, and the fun you have is relative to how lucky you get (a bit true to life, I suppose). For the uninitiated, Mario Party is set up like a board game where players roll dice and move to spaces that provide either coins, surprise actions, or stars. Whoever has the most stars in the end, wins, and that is why Mario Party can really kick you in the shorts.

The placement of stars rotates around the map as players pass star spots and purchase them. This requires luck in rolling, obviously, and then having enough coins (typically 10) to purchase the star. Getting a star is a triumphant moment. As a player, you have faced the challenges before you, hit a few good rolls and likely won a minigame or two, and received your just reward. Upon being purchased, Toadette, who is the keeper of the stars, moves to a new spot on the board. This is the first sneaky move Mario Party makes, as the star’s location could be far enough away that another player is justly in position to snag it, or the star could land within a one-roll distance of the player who just purchased a star before its relocation. If you are having a rough time with the dice, you could spend the entire game chasing stars and always ending up a roll or two short. Yet, fair player, do not fear! Mario Party has a fun little mechanics in place to help the dice-challenged.

There are vendors and mystery spots on the board that give passersby and lucky landers the opportunity to snag a star with minimal effort. If you pass Lakitu, for example, he will stop your progress and offer assistance. One of his options, assuming you have coins, is to steal a star from another player of your choice. This essentially makes Lakitu a second, albeit more expensive, star space, and he does not add to the number of stars in play, just redistributes the wealth. He is truly, along with any players who target one of my stars, a son of a bitch. A second awful mechanic to give the unfortunate players an opportunity, is the mystery space. Mystery spaces are not denoted on the board, but when a player reaches one, the spot reveals a classic Super Mario World brick that transforms into a wheel with a highlighted section around which an arrow spins from the center. If the spinning arrow lands in the highlighted segment, the player gets a star. Earning a star this way puts another star in play. If you are keeping tabs at home so far, stars are essentially earned via 98% luck and 2% charity, and if you are actually playing the game, you are either feeling pretty good at this point or wondering why you agreed to subject yourself to such maddening ass-hattery. Everyone loves a comeback story, however, so the scales can still tip in favor of those that lag behind. In fact, Toad always gives a prediction for the winner ahead of the final three turns, and he always picks the individual in last place, which does nothing other than give that person hope.

Looking at the photo below, the team composed of Shy Guy and Bowser is undoubtedly feeling pretty confident in their likelihood of victory. They have two more stars and 46 more coins than the competing duo; that is not insignificant. Yet, Mario Party has one final stage in the game that is, frankly, one of the most maddening mechanics in all of gaming: the awarding of bonus stars.

After the final turn has concluded, Toad and Toadette award bonus stars to the contestants or teams based upon their performances in specific categories. These exact categories are not known beforehand and exist in a different combination of two (three, with a 20-turn game – no thank you) with each game played. The possible categories are:

• Minigame Star – to whomever won the most minigames
• Rich Star – to player with the most throughout the game
• Eventful Star – to player landing on the most Event Spaces
• Item Star – to player using the most items
• Ally Star – to player with the most allies
• Buddy Star – to player with a particular, random ally
• Sightseer Star – to player traveling the most spaces
• Slowpoke Star – to players traveling the least spaces
• Unlucky Star – to player landing on the most Red or Bad Luck Spaces
• Stompy Star – to player who stomped on others the most
• Doormat Star – to player stomped on the most

Bonus stars have the ability to fling an underdog to victory or make the rich richer. Either way, their influence can make the prior hour-plus of game playing feel pointless in around 30 seconds. After the bonus stars are doled out, the players are presented with the following screen:

In this example, the rich were able to bathe in the delights of excessive opulence, while the losers wore the only appropriate expression that translated to: “This was stupid. Why did we just waste our time? Fuck this game.” The sentiment is not wrong. Even in victory, Mario Party makes you feel dirty and sympathetic. Nobody wins, and that is why Mario Party is an a-hole.

P.S.

Mario Party should be a perfect online board game-esque option, especially in the time of Covid, right? Wrong! Nintendo’s games have some of the worst online options for getting a group together for virtual gaming, and Mario Party is a shining example of this alarming ineptitude. Instead of taking the main game mode, “Mario Party”, and making it online-capable, the only online option is “Online Marathon”, where you and three others can only play minigames. Initially, this does not feel like a complete waste, as the minigames are actually the fun part out of the entire shit-show, but then you realize there are only a handful of minigames that can be played in this mode; you do not even get access to the full minigame library. As the world had to isolate, this game could have been a shit-covered beacon in the darkness, but Mario Party and Nintendo let us all down. Every man, woman, and child who picked up this game thought they were running headlong into fun. Instead, Nintendo tricked everyone into face planting directly into Donkey Kong’s jungle-heated, sweat-covered taint, and I can still taste the salt.