The Mario Party series is undoubtedly one of the more derivative Mario spin-off series. They found a format for a digital board game with the first one and have been mostly iterating on it since, and for someone who has played the series before, Mario Party DS isn’t really packing any surprises. However, bringing the series to the Nintendo DS did open up a few new options like touch-based control and microphone functionality, but it seems like the novelty of these features was more important than any substantial or creative integration.

For the main mode of play, Mario Party DS has five different boards the player can choose from. Play will involve four players, with up to three of them being controlled by the game if necessary. It goes without saying that Mario Party as a whole is more enjoyable if other humans are involved, because even with difficulty settings to make the computer players more of a challenge, they still behave coldly and fall into behavior patterns that make them easy to predict or exploit. Picking from a fairly standard line-up of Mario’s friends you set out to gather coins by landing on special spaces on the game board or by winning mini-games so that you can buy a Star. The player with the most Stars at the end of the game wins, with ties broken by the highest amount of coins. In Party mode, you can also enable Bonus Stars that are rewarded at the end of the game and can turn the tide, the game rewarding certain behaviors with a potentially game-changing boost right before the winner is determined. Bonus Stars are one of the smartest additions to Mario Party as it allows players who don’t succeed with the basic board game play a way to earn the win otherwise, but it’s left out of story mode thankfully to avoid unnecessary obstacles to completion.

As far as the board designs are concerned this time around, there’s nothing particularly exciting on offer. The pinball machine is visually exciting and full of ways to launch yourself around the board, but the garden and music room are fairly typical and the remaining two rely on very plain advancement dictated a bit too much by landing on special spaces. To try and set them apart in more than design, Star acquisition has a few gimmicks depending on the board. The garden and pinball level are straightforward, but the music room makes the stars slowly grow more expensive after each purchase before looping around to the small starting price. The music room’s gimmick is probably the best, as Donkey Kong’s board lets players purchase as many Stars as they can afford in one go and is designed to rob players of coins on their path to buy them, meaning a lucky player can find themselves flush with cash and essentially have the win guaranteed. The library doesn’t involve snowballing, but it does come down to luck again as there are three spots a hidden star can be at one time and the map is separated into two segments that luck will determine if you can switch between. If the Star ends up on a side and players have terrible luck switching to it, the Library can grow dull or tilted in the favor of someone who has one section all to themselves.

But luck and chance are part of Mario Party’s DNA. Every turn involves the players rolling a 10-sided die to determine where they move to and facing the effects of where they land. Blue spaces give 3 coins, Red ones take 3 away, Question mark spaces will have unique effects based on the board that can move you, take away coins, or give you coins, the Duel space lets you challenge foes for a pot of either your coins or Stars, the Bowser space causes a negative effect to one player or more, and Mario Party DS introduces the Friend Space to the series. Landing on it will give you and another player of your choice 5 coins, which isn’t quite exciting enough to earn it a spot as a regular feature in future titles. The player is also able to change the nature of the common Red and Blue spaces if they collect hexes, these items allowing players to steal coins or Stars from a player who lands on that space.

The Question mark spots and Bowser spaces lead to the biggest shake-ups due to their many possible outcomes, and while you can influence which spaces you land on a little by choosing which forks in the road you take and which items you buy from the shops like Double Dice Blocks or Warps, you’ll still find the whims of fate to be your biggest foe in this game. A particularly egregious moment happened when I just started playing this title where the Star was 7 spaces from the start, and while everyone else was looping around the board collecting the coins to buy it, I was rolling ones and twos, slowly edging towards it and collecting cash myself. However, before I could reach it, the computer players had made a full loop of the board and swoop in to grab it. Random chance can be a fun element when its effects are minimal, but it’s hard not to be frustrated with such flagrant cases of luck determining the outcome entirely, especially since the game throws in one of Mario Party’s worst ideas: Hidden Blocks. When landing on a blue space, there is a very small but present chance players might just randomly find a block that will give them a bunch of coins or Stars, but Mario Party DS can even put in an item called a Ztar instead that will rob you of one of your Stars. Randomly tipping the scales so much stings for everyone but the lucky one, and it gets more annoying that these features are present in single-player’s story mode.

Mario Party DS’s story seems to have a greater influence on the game’s design than most titles in the series. This time around, Mario and his friends are invited to their old enemy Bowser’s place for what seems like a peace offering but is revealed to be a trap, the evil turtle shrinking all the characters down and flinging them out of his castle. The entire game takes place as these shrunken characters, meaning all the board designs are focused on the idea of being really tiny in otherwise regular places. Even the minigames are mostly structured around interacting with objects like school supplies, toys, and food that dwarf you in your current diminutive state. Not everything perfectly lines up with the idea of being tiny, but it never contradicts it either, with minigames about being in a lava crater or rounding up enemies still working without stretching the imagination too much. The journey of the story involves, of course, trying to return to regular size, but you solve problems along the way and earn Sky Crystals for defeating the bosses. Usually weak Mario enemies are major foes in your current state, and after winning a board game you’ll play what amounts to a boss minigame, their difficulty varying from stupidly easy to a decent challenge and providing a bit of variety in single-player. However, having a story mode in a luck-based board game has a few flaws, that being it can be annoying to end up in an unwinnable game because of the luck of the die roll or other random factor. The game saves at the end of every turn though, so if it is an issue that could have swung a different way, you can always reset your system to wipe out the recent event and avoid the tedium of starting a ten turn board game all over again.

There is, thankfully, a factor in Mario Party that keeps it from being purely based on chance. At the end of a turn it’s mini-game time, and all four players will be sorted to play either a 4-way, 2-on-2, 1-vs.-3, or Battle game. Battle is the only one with unusual rules as you all contribute coins and your placement determines how many you get, but the rest of the variations only pay-out to the victor with 10 coins. Some minigames are just about collecting coins and you get to keep your haul, but most of the time you must outperform the opposition in a uniquely designed task. While the theming is on-point with the game’s story of shrunken characters, the actual play varies a bit in quality. Having the touch screen and microphone supplementing your buttons opens up minigame design to more complexity and originality, but some games are more focused on the novelty of it than the fun. Gusty Blizzard and Toppling Terror are just about blowing as hard as you can, Boogie Beam and Book It! are fairly mindless and straightforward “press things properly” games, Cheep Cheep Chance is literally all up to chance, and if you have a friend who can hammer a button quickly enough, games like Get the Lead Out and Track Star can be foregone conclusions. A few touch screen games are a bit basic as well, but besides the mentioned games, the bulk of Mario Party DS’s minigames float around average, some tipping towards bad or good a bit more because of designs more conducive to interesting play. The game of chicken Study Fall, the corn maze photo battle Camera Shy, outracing a vacuum in Dust Buddies, and the tracing challenge Double Vision seem to balance challenge and competition really well. Your play group will determine your favorites, but most minigames can lean differently based on skill and usually the right amount of luck so that less-skilled players can sometimes come out on top.

Mario Party DS knew it had an odd spot on a portable system though. You can play single cart Mario Party thanks to download play, but that still means you need each player to have a DS system. Mario Party DS would have to make its single player a bit more interesting, and one method it tries is adding way too many collectibles. Beating the story once is a good time, but the game wants you to beat it with every character, fulfill odd conditions, or pull off other achievement-like tricks to build up Mario Party Points. The unlockables for getting a lot of Mario Party Points are mostly just figures and badges, making it a fairly unrewarding task but also allowing you to ignore it if you don’t want to while away your life playing virtual board games. The better addition for longevity is the puzzle minigames, Mario Party DS borrowing minigames from the older titles and inventing one of its own that are mostly variations on match-three style block clearing games. They get a bit more creative with some of them, so while an individual player might not find them all to be hits, they might be able to get stuck into one of the designs on offer.

THE VERDICT: Mario Party DS, even with the advantages of the touch screen and portability, doesn’t really make a particularly unique mark on the series. It’s got most of the series’s staple ups and downs. Luck-based moments can undermine the experience and single-player, but mini-games make competition with humans fairly fun and Mario Party DS at least has a few quirks to its board design that you can have more than a straight forward board game experience. There are a few stinkers in the minigame department, but most of them are acceptable, acceptable being the word that best describes most of this DS outing. It has the expected foibles of a digital board game but most of the appeals as well, just nothing particularly exciting or innovative besides a strong commitment to the concept of the characters being shrunken down.

And so, I give Mario Party DS for the Nintendo DS…

An OKAY rating. Just like real board games, sometimes you might feel like whipping out a different Mario Party for the sake of minor variation rather than a vastly different experience, and Mario Party DS seems a fairly good fit in the inoffensive mid-tier of Mario Party titles. It’s internal variety is alright and while some minigames are more gimmick than substance, the majority of them are enjoyable turn-enders that support the somewhat straightforward but lightly varied boards. The story mode is easy enough to stomach once with some fun boss minigames but the game expects too much with its collectibles. Random elements are sort of mitigated with the purchasable items, but if they had toned down on the absurd moments like Hidden Blocks and put more time into board gimmicks and competitive minigames instead of streams of tedious collectibles, it might have rubbed shoulders with the better games in the series.

To explain Mario Party DS can be done almost by simply saying it’s title. It’s the expected Mario Party formula available on your Nintendo DS, with the expected gimmicks and adjustments made to suit the platform. You can poke at things that are slightly out of the ordinary, but as soon as you see the title, you pretty much know what you’re in for and your enjoyment of the title will likely be tied to your initial reaction to the concept.