You pretty much know what you’re going to get with a Mario Party game these days, now that the series’ most experimental phase is seemingly behind it. There’s the board games, the minigames and then a healthy helping of arbitrary shenanigans that makes Mario Kart’s blue shells look tame by comparison. Super Mario Party Jamboree adds a bunch of new ways to mix up the main Mario Party game mode, but also comes with an antidote that cuts out a lot of the randomisation. Enter the Pro Rules.
Pro Rules is the version of Mario Party you need to play if you’re tired of having victory snatched away from you at the last moment, whether it’s someone paying a Boo to steal a star off you, the new Buddy system giving another player a massive advantage by doubling up all their opportunities for a few rounds, or a bad spin when landing on a Bowser space ripping a star off you. And that’s before we think about the end game bonus stars, which can hand out stars for purely luck-based things like landing on event spaces, or finding invisible boxes.
As I write things down, I’m reminded just how many of these randomised elements are found in these games!
Pro Rules strip out a bunch of this randomisation, making Mario Party much more of a competitive sport with clarity from the first turn to the last.
It starts with the core set up, with Pro Rules setting a game to a fixed 12 turns run, and announcing which one of three bonus stars will be in effect – furthest travelled, least travelled and most even spaces.
The boards themselves have also been modified and what special spaces offer now set in stone, so there’s no chance time spaces, lucky spaces only give you coins or a double dice, and Bowser spaces will always remove 1 star. Even the potential locations of stars are indicated, making them much more predictable and allowing a bit more forward thinking and planning from players.
Players also get to pick one of a small selection of items to start the game with, and as you pass a shop, you’ll see that there’s two of each item stocked, with no fresh shipments to top them up.
This is still Mario Party at it’s core, though. You’re still trying to rush across a quirkily themed board – I quite like the new karting themed one, Roll ’em Raceway– get to and buy stars, and get one over your rival players where possible. To that end, there’s still some of the shenanigans featured, with the Boo space still letting you steal coins or pay for a stolen star, trap that you can lay to steal from hapless players that land on them, and the aforementioned Bowser space stealing a star from you. It’s just that little bit more predictable in a way that could be more palatable to those who dislike too much randomisation in their games, and allow for more specific strategies.
Between turns, you also still have the minigames – now randomly chosen from player votes and removing more luck-based games – and these are really still the heart of Super Mario Party Jamboree. I know some people who’ve never even played the main Mario Party game in favour of the quick bite-sized minigame modes that have them going back-to-back-to-back.
While a great addition for those that want it, I imagine that the main Mario Party mode will still be the more popular one. For one thing, games can be much longer for a full evening’s entertainment, but also some of the more excessive random elements can be a great leveller for someone that had a rotten string of luck and poor dice rolls to start a game. Either way, it’s still Mario Party, and Super Mario Party Jamboree promises to be the biggest game in the series to date.
