There’s nothing more fun when you’re feeling social than a party, but these occasions come in all shapes and sizes. Back in the nineties we exclusively had S Club Parties of course, but over the years there have been plenty of fancy dress parties, wild alcohol fuelled parties and board game hangouts I’ve attended with glee. The best parties are the ones with video games though obviously, and what better game than Mario Party to celebrate with. It’s been a while since I rolled the dice with Mario and his pals, and I was happy to change that thanks to Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV on the Switch 2.
Back on the Nintendo 64 I was an avid Mario Party player, and often had friends over to fight against in the original entry in the series. Over the years though as real life friends became harder to steal for hours at a time I drifted somewhat from the Mario Party games, and before playing the brand new shiny Switch 2 version of Jamboree I hadn’t partied since the Wii. Thankfully Mario Party is just like riding a bike but with more dice, so it was easy to get back into chasing those stars.
If somehow you’ve avoided all Mario Party games until today, here’s the pitch: You and three other players take turns rolling a dice and moving around a board, with the goal of obtaining the most stars before the game ends. Most of the time stars cost a whole lot of coins though, so you’ll need to fill up your wallet by winning the minigames you play between each turn of play. As you might expect there are a whole lot of shenanigans that happen when you land on certain spaces though, which can turn the tables in a heartbeat.
The selection of boards in Super Mario Party Jamboree is just fantastic, with each themed in a wonderful way to shake up the action. The fast paced Mario Kart board rewards high rollers, whereas the constantly shifting tides of Goomba Lagoon require a bit more strategy and clever item management to succeed in. All seven of the maps (three of which are unlocked by leveling up a weird single player Battle Pass) you can roll across are absolutely wonderful, and keep the party pumping with their various gimmicks.
As fun as rolling dice is though, it’s the minigames that really make the Mario Party games special, and in Jamboree it’s no different. If you’re in a free for all against everyone, competing in pairs or in a handicap match, the games you’ll be playing here are an absolute blast. Whether you want to play with motion controls or not the selection of games is varied enough it doesn’t matter, but I must admit that against all odds the motion control games are some of the absolute best. Racing to roll a golf ball into the hole is just magic, and all those years of rolling marbles around on the Wii served me well against my rivals.
The huge difference between Super Mario Party Jamboree and its predecessors is the addition of Jamboree Buddies, who are Mario characters you can recruit to join you on your quest for stars. If you’ve got a buddy you’ll get double the rewards when landing on a space, be able to steal coins or stars with Boo twice, and can even buy two stars at once when you reach Toad with them. It’s a really cool mechanic that adds a lot of extra strategy to the game, and to grab one of these powerful allies you’ll have to play an extra long minigame which are all incredible.
If it only featured the fantastic board game content the series is known for then Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV would be a wonderful multiplayer game, but there’s so much more than that. Various ways to compete against the CPU, friends, or randoms in minigames are available, like the fantastic marathon running race (the Koopathalon) where you move forward by collecting coins in unique minigames you can’t play anywhere else.
There’s also the completely wild co-op experience Bowser Kaboom Squad, where you and seven other players will run around a battlefield trying to beat up Imposter Bowser. This involves loading bombs into a cannon while avoiding the attacks of this Koopa King stand-in, and of course some minigames to help along the way. It’s a really unique game mode I came back to more than expected, which is especially fun with friends.
Perhaps what you really want to do in Mario Party Jamboree though is play some motion control games, and if that’s the case then there’s plenty to jump into. Paratroopa Flight School allows you to fly around with joycons and is both silly and surprisingly deep with various modes. There’s also a co-op rhythm cooking game, which is basically like playing Rhythm Heaven but with your buddies. Finally Toad’s Item Factory is a clever physics puzzle game where you use joycons to move a ball through various stages. I expected to barely touch these modes and was surprised to find all three of them seriously entertaining, and much more than a distraction from the board games.
If you played Super Mario Party Jamboree on the original Switch you’ll likely be familiar with all of these modes already, so let’s talk about the new Jamboree TV content. The main hook of this is the ability to use the Switch 2 camera to capture your reactions as you play, which is an awesome way to make playing with friends online much more hilarious. It also features plenty of new minigames that you can opt to include in the classic board game mode, which use the mouse controls of the Switch 2. These are some of the best minigames that Jamboree has to offer, with air hockey, sorting post and navigating mazes with your cursor all providing peak Mario Party entertainment.
There’s also another mouse based mode called Carnival Coaster, which allows you and a friend to ride a coaster and blast various Mario enemies in a light gun style. It’s another fun way to show off the tech of this new console, albeit maybe not a mode you’ll come back to time and time again.
The final mode of Jamboree TV is Bowser Live, which is a sort of weird dystopian game show where you’ll compete in camera or microphone based games. This is by far the weakest part of the line-up, because there are only three minigames in each category and none of them are entertaining. Despite being the headline act it was the one mode I played once and then was never even slightly tempted to go back to.
There’s a lot to love in the mammoth package that is Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV, but I must admit the newly added Switch 2 content felt a little lacking. If you’re happy to just play more of the same (wonderful) boards and race to grab stars but with the addition of camera feeds then you’ll have an absolute blast though, just don’t expect to be spending hours playing the other new modes.
