Mario Party is a franchise known for providing excitement, laughs, silly shenanigans, and also friendship-ruining trauma. It just comes with the territory of a series that thrives off of unpredictability, chaos, and luck. If you enter a game of Mario Party knowing that it will all just be in good fun, it’s one of the most entertaining party games out there.
The series is also known for its minigames. Hundreds and hundreds of goofy little anecdotes in your journey throughout this wacky party world. Some are pretty good. Some are pretty awful. Some require genuine skill, and some are entirely reliant on random chance and luck.
Here are my ten favorite!
10) Castle Clearout (MP9)
Admittedly, this one barely counts, considering it’s a single-player-exclusive minigame that you only access through a side menu outside of the main game experience. But this is my list, and I wanted to include it! It is still technically a minigame, after all, and there’s probably no single Mario Party minigame I’ve played more than this one. It’s just a basic puzzle game that acts like a backwards Bubble Bobble, but that doesn’t make it any less addicting. I’ve definitely put more time into this than I should, entering a zen-like state and just going and going.
9) Day At The Races (MP2)
So, though it hurts to admit it, I don’t actually really like this minigame all that much, at least on principle. It’s a minigame that is 100% determined by luck, where you select a participant and then just hope that they win the race. But, unlike other luck-based minigames that usually result in your character getting knocked out early, this one keeps things neck-and-neck from start-to-finish. You never know who is going to win until the very final seconds, making it weirdly competitive and exciting despite the utter lack of agency you have.
8) Snipe For The Picking (MP8)
Not everyone is a huge fan of motion controls, but despite the simplicity of pointing at a screen at seeing your cursor move around, there’s just something appealing about that to me. I love shooting arrows in Twilight Princess by pointing at the screen and clicking the B button, and I love doing the same thing here to hit the high-point areas on target after target. This one also has the bonus of being based on reflexes, as you’re trying to adapt to each new target as quickly as possible, figuring out where the highest-point area to shoot is, and then having to accurately shoot it fast.
7) Look Away (MP2)
One of my favorite things to do in multiplayer games is to try and psyche out my fellow players, or engage in some intricate mind games. This is a minigame that is built off of both of those facets. There’s almost nothing funnier than tricking your fellow players at the last second by looking in a direction they didn’t expect, catching them out and beating them. The little tune that plays during this minigame also very easily gets stuck in your head. I also love the absurd detail that players who have lost can keep playing anyway, and if they get caught again their character’s head just keeps getting smaller.
6) King Boo’s Puzzle Attack (MP9)
This is a very unique minigame, in that it’s essentially just a little match-three puzzle game that you play for about three minutes. And if the puzzle-themed minigame a few entries higher on this list wasn’t indication enough, I really like puzzle games. Despite this minigame being, thematically, a competitive boss fight, there’s something weirdly cozy about it. You just sort of stick to your corner of the screen, shuffle the icons around, and score matches and points. It’s another minigame that is heavily skill-based, and it feels good to wrack up matching combos.
5) Peak Precision (MP9)
This minigame ends before you can even blink, but I absolutely adore the speed and precision required to excel in it. It reminds me a ton of that really fun piano keys arcade game, where the goal is just to push a series of buttons in a specific order as fast as possible. It’s 100% down to skill, relying exclusively on how fast your hand-eye-coordination can keep up with your brain. You enter a sort of flow state, mashing the buttons on your controller as your character skedaddles up the side of the cliff like their life depends on it. It’s a ton of fun!
4) Bombs Away (MP2)
Mario Party will, on occasion, engage in a minigame that feels a lot more Mario than Party, specifically with regards to being focused around platforming and movement. This is a classic example of that exact formula. Rather than relying on luck, or simple button presses, you have to have a pretty firm grasp of the platformer genre in order to run around, jump, and hit other players in this challenge. All the while, you’re dealing with a tilting and shaking island, and a ton of explosive bombs being lobbed at you. And then to top it all off, a huge missile fires at the end which is super hard to avoid. It’s pretty exhilarating for a thirty second scuffle.
3) Toad In The Box (MP2)
Many minigames in Mario Party end up coming down just to luck, so when a minigame focuses more on skill, that’s always something that I enjoy. And when you marry skill together with timing/reflexes, that’s the special area that I really love. This minigame is one of my absolute favorites because it all comes down to each player’s grasp of timing and reflexes, trying to punch the box above your head when it displays a picture of Toad and not an image of an enemy. Each round gets harder, not only requiring tighter timings, but meaning that even a player in last place can come back from behind to cinch an exciting win.
2) Blooper Barrage (MP9)
This one is very similar to the shooting gallery minigame from earlier in this list, only this time it’s framed around an intense boss battle and comes at the end of the board to cap off your party adventure. And those facts alone are a part of the reason why it ranks so high. It’s still the fun point-at-the-screen-and-shoot action that I really enjoy, but with a primary big boss target who spends a lot of time moving around and attacking you back with projectiles. But, for full transparency, this boss minigame also has a really cool song that plays, which is a big reason why it ranks so high!
Here’s that song, if you’re interested: BLOOPER’S MAD!
1) Honeycomb Havoc (MP2)
I mentioned how I like skill rather than luck, but do you know what I love even more than that? Strategy. It’s why I love turn-based RPGs, and games like Fire Emblem. Skill is fun, and preferrable to luck, but I really love being able to think through the steps to my victory more than anything else.
This minigame lets me do exactly that. It plays out more like an intense logic puzzle than any sort of twitchy button-mashing affair. All you have to do is decide if you want to take one fruit or two, while avoiding taking any bees. You have to take at least one fruit, though, which means if the person who went before you took two fruit and set you up for some bees, your loss is unavoidable. How do you escape that fate? By making sure that you’re constantly playing twenty steps ahead of everyone else.
Does this minigame give me a little bit of a headache sometimes, with all of the deep thinking going on? Yeah, maybe! Do I take it a little more seriously than I need to? Almost undoubtedly. But I still love it a ton!
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 