Surprisingly, it’s taken this long for the largest brick manufacturer in the world to build a monument to Mario Party, considering that the LEGO brand is now featured on practically every family-friendly multiplayer game you can imagine, including kart racers, Super Smash Bros. clones, and even a Rock Band spin-off. However, LEGO Party is more than just a block-based parody of Nintendo’s venerable virtual board game franchise. It may build upon the foundations of Mario Party, substituting a variety of ridiculous minifigs for the best of the Mushroom Kingdom, but every single one of the 60 minigames is bursting with personality, and not a single stud-based dreck exists.
LEGO Party contains everything you need to put up a fantastic night in with friends and family if you want loads of laughs. The fundamentals of LEGO Party will be as simple to understand as a little coffee mug in a minifig’s fist if you have ever played one of Nintendo’s party starters before.
Here, you and three other players navigate four specially themed game boards filled with different stud-sapping risks and possibly profitable event spots to land on. The objective is to gather gold bricks and studs rather than stars and cash. Each session can be as short as six rounds or about 45 minutes, depending on the board you choose, but it can also be extended to three-hour, 24-round epics. In each round, all four players compete against one another in a minigame that is easy for LEGO Juniors and seasoned Technic fans to learn but challenging to master.
These can have significant leaderboard-leveling effects, such as teleporting your minifig straight to a gold brick space or slowing your roll to increase your chances of moving the precise number of spaces you need. Each player can carry up to three power-ups, which can be purchased with studs at the shop or gathered from Wheel of Fortune-style spins. Many of these fundamentals have been established repeatedly in the Mario Party design, and Lego Party maintains many of these tried-and-true core ideas by adopting the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fish the dog-eared instruction booklet out of the toy chest and rebuild it” philosophy.
Nonetheless, the Pirate, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park LEGO Party boards differ in a few important ways. First of all, each minigame is selected democratically by placing your minifig in front of one of three alternatives that are shown at the start of each round. I appreciated that this gave my party some more power over the activities we might partake in throughout each session. (Of course, you can also choose to play Mario Party or another more randomized minigame.)
In contrast to Mario Party’s more strict arrangement, which dictates the order via a dice roll at the beginning and sticks with it all the way to the conclusion, I also like LEGO Party’s concept of having the outcomes of each minigame influence the sequence of turns in each subsequent round. The results-driven approach of LEGO Party, in my opinion, improves the ebb and flow of every board and provides additional motivation to do well in every minigame.
There are numerous unique building zones to land on each of LEGO Party’s exquisitely crafted and candy-colored boards.
More significantly, each of LEGO Party’s exquisitely detailed and candy-colored boards features some unique building zones where you can land. You can then choose from two different structures to erect in those areas, which can significantly change the map and add many game-changing elements. For instance, you could choose to construct the Extreme Zone in the Theme Park board, which offers a series of frantic stunt challenges that must be completed to receive a gold brick.
As an alternative, you could choose the Royal Ramparts, which includes a catapult for snatching one of the gold bricks of another random player and a ballista-based minigame for swiftly snaring studs. Over the course of the dozen or so hours of playtime my family and I have spent together so far, each iteration of these game boards has seemed new and enjoyable, especially when combined with the several other board-specific aspects, such as the moment the Space map briefly changes into a turn-based combat against a gigantic green alien.
Everything is Awesome
The presence of Ted Talker and Paige Turner, the LEGO Party’s own quip-cracking commentary team, has also contributed significantly to its constant humor. Ted and Paige, who appear to have been inspired by humorous game show playcallers like those of Wipeout or Holey Moley, give each turn a colorful context and react in real time to each player’s performance in a minigame, either hilariously dragging the player when they’re struggling or bigging them up when they’re winning.
Even after playing through all four of LEGO Party’s boards several times, I’ve surprisingly hardly heard the same joke twice. To be fair, though, this may be because the commentary is frequently overpowered by uncontrollably loud laughter or sour arguments as a player’s hard-earned gold brick is brutally taken away. That really hurts more than suddenly finding a misplaced LEGO brick with the fleshy part of your bare foot when you’re playing with a competitive bunch.
SMG Studio, the developer of LEGO Party, which previously amused with the slapstick-based shenanigans of its Moving Out series, has truly outdone itself in creating a construction derby of morish minigames. The rest of the humor in LEGO Party comes from the competitive chaos of the challenges themselves. Memory-testing tasks, physics-based races, and rhythm-based dance-offs are just a few of the varied and entertaining minigames available in Lego Party, which is bursting with individuality and inventiveness. Furthermore, it’s always a good sign of how instantly captivating multiplayer minigames are when players become engrossed in the competition without even realizing they’ve left the pre-game practice screen. This has happened frequently to me so far with LEGO Party.
Some minigames, like the obstacle course sprint that seems like it belongs in Fall Guys or the zero-gravity space shuttle soccer that is quite similar to Rocket League, are fantastic toybox tributes to other titans of online mayhem. Others, such as the one that includes attempting to construct creatures out of a stack of variously shaped blocks without any guidance, capitalize on the recognizable tactile sensation of playing with LEGO itself. One challenge involves defending four soccer goals against an increasing number of balls, resembling an inverted version of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Another involves placing each minifig on a LEGO motorcycle and requiring you to maneuver through a winding course, resembling a cutesy version of Trials HD.
The minigames that feel like nothing else we’ve ever played are some of the most popular among the competitors on my sofa. There is the hectic, four-way fight to break your opponent’s LEGO vase with a brick boulder that becomes faster as it bounces off each player, or the showdown with a nightclub theme where you have to rush to throw your minifig onto an elastic grappling hook-equipped floating dance floor. Naturally, each member of my group has their own favorites. For example, I adore anything involving four wheels, my son is a huge fan of zero-gravity games, and my daughter’s favorite is essentially whatever minigame she won most recently.
The sheer amount of playable minifigs in LEGO Party’s lineup, along with the wide range of character customization choices, more than makes up for the lack of characters as iconic as Mario or Yoshi. In addition to giving you carrots that can be used to unlock a different collection of minifigs in the shop, playing through each of the game boards or one of the well-chosen minigame playlists gets you XP that progressively unlocks new minifigs along many straightforward progression pathways.
There are more minifigs than you can toss a mini twig at—by my reckoning, there are well over 200—ranging from fashionable ninja warriors to person-shaped pizza slices and goth kid minifigs. As you unlock each one, you may utilize its component pieces to create completely new creations. Do you want a minifig wearing an American football helmet, tigerprint pants, and a linen jacket a la Miami Vice? It’s a strange combo, but it’s all yours.
Speaking of tying everything together, I would love to see LEGO Party make use of the numerous pop cultural collaborations the Danish brick manufacturer has accumulated over the years, either through expansion packs or upcoming follow-ups. A LEGO Indiana Jones board with event spaces to activate rocks and booby traps reminiscent of the Raiders of the Lost would be a treat, as would a LEGO Star Wars board with minigames centered around lightsaber fights and Death Star trench runs.
To truly complete the circle, it’s not out of the question that we might see a LEGO Mario LEGO Party extension, at least for the Switch versions, given Nintendo’s recent cozying up with the LEGO brand. I’ve had a great time with LEGO Party so far, and I sincerely hope that it’s laid the wonderful plastic foundations for a series that’s here to stay. To be clear, nothing of this kind has been revealed, and I’m just thinking aloud.
Verdict
The tried-and-true Mario Party format isn’t entirely reinvented by LEGO Party, but it does have some welcome structural changes, a consistently excellent selection of minigames that have been tested for humor, and an entertainingly goofy game show presentation that hasn’t gone overboard. Although there aren’t as many game boards as Super Mario Party Jamboree, the transforming nature of their layouts adds a welcome element of surprise and variety to each session, and the extensive minifig customization choices are fun to experiment with. LEGO Party is a creative, colorful, and consistently hilarious game designed to transform any dull evening into a block party full of belly laughs.
