Review: SUPER MARIO PARTY JAMBOREE offers fun minigames for friends and family

Last month, minigame fans were able to enjoy the launch of Super Mario Party Jamboree on Nintendo Switch. Jamboree is the thirteenth console release of the franchise and was developed by Nintendo Cube and published by Nintendo. Nintendo was kind enough to provide me with a digital code, but you can purchase your copy from your favorite retail outlets including Humble (affiliate link) and GameStop (affiliate link).

If you’ve ever played Mario Festayou already understand most of the gameplay. You choose a board for yourself and up to three friends to play on, taking turns rolling the dice as you race towards the stars and then playing minigames every now and then. There’s a little more to the game than what I’ll talk about in a moment, but if it doesn’t sound like a good time, this game isn’t for you. Now let’s get more into the weeds.

When you look at the fundamental aspect of Mario Festa gameplay (i.e. the board game part), therefore Jamboree boasts seven different boards and over 110 minigames. The minigames come in a variety of free-for-all, 2v2 and 1v3 varieties and most of them were fun to play. Each board also has a difficulty level which I assume is more of a complexity scale.

The 1 star board is fairly simple with about 2-3 loops you can access, but high scores have many more ways to traverse the board and hopefully beat your enemies to the stars. What’s strange to me is that you start the game with three or four boards unlocked but the difficulty scores are scattered.

You have star 1, but you have to level up to unlock star 2. I would have just thought it would start you off on the 1 star, 2 star, and 3 star boards with higher levels unlocked later. This isn’t a problem, it’s just something that seemed strange to me.

One thing I’m not a fan of is how the game likes to put the first star of a level really far away. If you’re playing a 10 round game (as short as possible), I found that the first turn someone would generally get the first star was the fifth or sixth turn due to how large the boards tend to be.

Combine this with the fact that coins have no meaning once someone has a star and it really bothers me about the scoring system in the game. I just wish the boards were smaller in shorter matches or the stars spawned a little closer to the players to generate more competition.

Another related frustration is the new Jamboree Buddies. This is a character that you can take with you and that provides some bonuses or special abilities for some turns. Overall, I actually like Jamboree Buddies. However, due to the size of the boards, there have been multiple games where no one was able to get a Jamboree Buddy due to where they spawned. It just seems counterproductive.

Of course, classic gameplay isn’t all that Jamboree has to offer. There are seven other game modes to play. Some of these are fun and some were just plain boring to me, but I’m sure some people still like them. My least favorite game mode is Paratroopa Flight School.

Basically, you hold the Joy-Con in your hands and flap your arms to fly around for three possible minigames. It was boring and really tired my arms. Toad’s item factory is slightly better. Each player (up to 4) has a Joy-Con and moves it up and down to bring the marbles to the end of the track.

Most of the tracks are easy, but there are some moments where you really want to take advantage of the physics engine. Next up is Rhythm Kitchen where you use the Joy-Cons to complete rhythm-based minigames. This is quite fun but can be more difficult for younger children who have not yet established a sense of rhythm.

Of course there’s Minigame Bay, perfect for when you just want to play minigames. You can choose from over 110 possibilities and skip the board game portion of Mario Party.

This brings us to the last two multiplayer game modes which are slightly different. Both are modes designed to be played online with only one player per system. The first is Koopathlon where you compete against up to 19 other players in a variety of minigames and score points based on how far you can get. You are trying to complete a predetermined number of laps around the track first.

I really enjoyed Koopathlon and think it’s one of the highlights of the Jamboree. The other mode is Bowser Kaboom Squad. You’ll work with up to seven other players to take down the Bowser impostor by finding bombs and using a cannon to fire them at the impostor. Occasionally, the team completes mini-games for a chance to get items to help you defeat the big guy. It’s fun, but not my favorite.

If you’re looking for some single-player goodness, though, Jamboree has the Party-Planner Trek. You will have to traverse five special game boards to help various NPCs and collect mini stars. As you do, you’ll unlock Party Plaza decorations, play minigames, and more.

As crazy as it sounds, I had a lot of fun with this game mode. I’m not one to really play games Mario Festa for single player experiences, but it wasn’t bad and I could see myself coming back if I had like 15 minutes here and there. It should be noted that progress is tracked per character.

The crazy thing Jamboree is that it finally introduces a feature to the Nintendo Switch that I’ve been asking for since launch. Jamboree allows other accounts on the same console to access and track rewards. This is the first game I know of that will do something like this on Switch and it’s a major win!

I could play Jamboree on my profile and then my wife and son could join and link their profiles to their respective checkpoints to track progress. Then, the next day, they could play on their profile and all the things they had unlocked by playing with me were still available to them! Why did it take Nintendo so long to resolve this issue!?

One feature of the Jamboree that I actually really enjoy is the reactions. These are simple emotes clearly designed more for online play to communicate with other players, but some of them are really fun to pop up in local games too. Additionally, as you play, you can purchase additional reactions. This is a small thing that isn’t a strong point, but some of them are just inexplicably funny and they’re almost all cute.

At the end of the day, your mileage will vary with Jamboree. If you and your friends are looking for fun Mario Festa game, Jamboree it’s good. My main issues with the game are really just basic aspects like the scoring. If I’m honest, I would have preferred more energy to devote to the development than to the Paratroopa Flight School.

Jamboree it also has other fun game modes to help you find different ways to have fun. As long as you recognize that this game is really meant to be played with friends with the best single player content (Koopathlon) requiring a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, then this is a great buy.

It reminds me though why I don’t need more than one Mario Festa per generation though. While for me personally it’s probably a 7, overall I’d say for fans of the genre it gets a higher score.