Super Mario Party Jamboree Promises 'Biggest Mario Party Yet'
Race around tracks, malls, volcanoes and more in the new Mario Party.
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If you thought a regular game of Mario Party was chaotic, imagine what it would be like with another 16 players.
That's one of the twists offered in the trailer for the new game announced during Tuesday's Nintendo Direct. Jamboree takes the party to an island resort and adds a handful of new games, plus a pair of remade maps from the first two games. The trailer boasted more than 110 mini games, which it calls "the biggest selection of Mario Party mini games yet."
The new boards are a multilevel mall, complete with flash sales, called Rainbow Galleria; a high-speed racing track, Roll 'em Raceway; a Goomba Lagoon map whose beach changes with the tide; a simpler-looking board called Mega Wiggler's Tree Party and a likely high-difficulty King Bowser's Keep board, complete with castle and lava. Jamboree is also bringing back the floating clouds of Mario's Rainbow Castle from Mario Party and the hootenannies of Western Land from Mario Party 2.
The trailer also showed off a new Koopathalon mode, where you compete against 19 other players online, and teased even more new modes, but didn't specify what those would be.
Mario Party games can be pretty divisive; most of my friends either love them or refuse to play them. I'm firmly on the love side of that fence. Sure, it's frustrating when Luigi comes from behind out of nowhere in a single turn by buying one star and getting a random Hidden Block star, but that anything-can-happen element is what makes these games fun for me. And everything in the Jamboree trailer looks like Nintendo is leaning into those elements. I'm also more excited about the new maps than I've been in a long time.
Mario Party Jamboree will be available Oct. 17. For more from Tuesday's Nintendo Direct, here's what to know about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.