Brick by Brick

Let me open with a quick story. Oh come on, keep scrolling, I promise it’ll be quick.

Once upon a time I was recruited by a software company. No, not one you’d know. They had a questionnaire for new hires that got emailed out as a company intro on everyone’s first day. The very first question, for some incredibly stupid reason that I know for a fact led to multiple HR complaints, was “what’s an unpopular opinion you hold?” Most people had the good sense to pick a non-issue, something about pineapple on pizza or whatever. Me? Mine was 7 words long.

“Mario Party is a game of skill.”

I have played, far, far, far too much Mario Party. That’s three fars just so you know I’m serious. I was ride or die for that stupid fucking franchise since day one, and I mean that very literally. Name a console MP and I have an opinion on it. They’re not even ones a YouTuber gave to me! Sadly the glory days of the franchise are largely past it. Even Jamboree, which is far better than anything since the Gamecube, is way too longwinded and mode-riddled when all anyone wants to do is play decent boards and not have it take 4 hours. I like that game plenty but if I never have to play Donkey Kong’s Fuckass Bongo Fiesta again it’ll be too soon.

Lego Party could have just been good, and that would have been good enough. No one expected anything of it, not really. The handful of offbrand Mario Parties of note are mostly known for being irredeemable – your Sonic Shuffles, Pac-Man Fevers, Pummel Party if you really hate yourself, etc. The closest we’ve gotten to anything good is 100% Orange Juice, but I’m inclined to consider that its own entirely different thing that happens to be roll & move.

What, pray tell, compelled SMG Studio to go so hard? What game director over there has played even more Mario Party than I have, got completely disillusioned with the franchise, then decided to fucking do something about it? It’s almost unsettling how carefully they’ve dissected their inspirations and improved upon them. Each and every area of this game, with the arguable exception of board count, has been adjusted with watchmaker levels of precision for a game that probably did not need to be. This clears its contemporaries so easily that I legitimately cannot imagine suggesting a Mario Party to friends at this point in time. This Lego game has got me fucked up, dude!

The first benefit is the most obvious: the titular bricks. Since this is a Lego game you can play as whatever freakish goober you please. The game starts you with a ton of body and costume pieces, as well as bespoke figures, and there are heaps more to unlock. Not every piece can be used on its own, but there are so many that it’s hard to complain. Our last game had us going head to head playing as a sunglasses-sporting llama, Hatshepsut in a death mask, a sleeveless yeti with his guns out, and a perfect Lego recreation of John Romero. Unless you exclusively played MP for its proximity to Nintendo-branded mascots this is all upside.

One entirely new feature is that this is framed as a game show, and game shows need a host. We get two! Ted Talker and Paige Turner go full Jackbox, constantly alternating between offering useful game information and riffing. They keep it as family friendly as you’d expect a Lego game to be, but we’ve had the wind knocked out of us occasionally with some out of pocket comments. You can shut them off if you’re not a fan but we haven’t felt the need. They also help keep the game moving because we no longer need to communicate every single piece of information in a bespoke game-stopping text box, which…actually yeah let’s talk about game speed real quick.

Lego Party is made for people with jobs and bedtimes. The default turn count for each of the boards range from 8-12 depending on size, and those turns fly by comparison to the recent Nintendo entries. They can get away with this lower average for a lot of reasons, most of which are gameplay related so that’ll make sense later, but you can scale them up or down if you see fit. Look, I have nearly infinite tolerance for overlong board games, but most people are not possessed of my particular strain of illness. If my friends are to be believed, I cannot tell you how nice it is to be able to slam through one of these in under an hour again.

It starts with the turn structure. We play minigames first in this house. Why? Because the placement also determines turn order for the rolling when you return to the board! Payouts scale with placement so you’ll typically aim for first, but there are absolutely cases where you’ll sandbag to take advantage of the changes in board state, especially in the lategame if you aren’t in striking distance of a golden brick (star). It’s a simple change with considerable impact, and the first of several.

We technically don’t roll dice here, though most turns it’s gonna be functionally the same as rolling a D8. Instead it’s a display with a visual randomizer, which is also how all the items that mess with said display’s effects are made evident. Clarity! Player communication! This continues to the well explained items (one of which lets you move backwards on the track ala the Reverse Shroom from MP3, a major part of why that entry is the best one), the various stage interactables and hazards, and so on. The only under-explained element is one of the coolest new ones – buildables! Every board has a few sections that are unfinished on arrival, and the first player to travel there gets to fill them in from a couple options for the rest of the game. Their functions are just…missing from the menu? They aren’t randomized so you’ll get it after a play or two, but given how solid the communication is everywhere else this feels like a strange omission. The inevitable downside of raising standards, I guess.

I’m going to mention this because two of my players found it jarring: the game features dual coding for all characters, identifying them by shape and color to avoid colorblind issues or having to record a bazillion voice lines for every outfit, then proceeds to call you players 1-4 the whole game instead of using shapes/colors. I have no issue with this, most of us haven’t, but my partner insists that this dissonance makes tracking who you are harder than it needs to be, especially with the variable turn order VS scoring rank. I’m a local multiplayer fiend who’s been in these trenches forever and as a result I’ve had zero trouble, but there’s a chance you may also find this to be the case if you aren’t accustomed to immediately memorizing which player # you are in any given game.

Anyway – the boards! There are only 4 and none of them are Bionicle, but they’re dense with stuff to do and the build zones change the decision space considerably. All of them feature events unique to their settings, have wildly different layouts to the point where navigating them feels completely different, and feature multiple ways to earn free gold bricks if you’re clever, lucky, or some combination of both. The Pirate one probably won’t hold your attention for long – it’s mostly a circuit with a couple alternate paths – but the Space map alone beats the breaks off of any recent Mario Party board, with sections connected by teleporters that allow you to travel to any area except the one you just came from. Ninjago is a bit more MP-like, featuring a section that you need to prioritize getting out of before a dragon incinerates it, “boss fights” (easy QTEs) that reward you with a gold brick if you hit them, and several turns in a path to the heavens opens up with a gold brick spot that’ll never teleport away if you’re willing to walk a bit further. These are all good, but my favorite by a solid margin is the Theme Park. The map is kind of shaped like a clover leaf, allowing players to lap the center over and over or diverge into the side attractions, each of which is a buildable determined by the players. The middle area has not one but two gold brick spots to buy from, but you’ll likely run out of money pretty fast, encouraging you to divert your attention to more resource-rich areas. This consistently leads to high scoring games with lots of volatility, which is when LP is at its best.

The game’s pretty generous with its main collectible, almost startlingly so, with the most notable example being the equivalent of battle minigame spaces. These are where the 2v2 games live, and the payout is a gold brick for each member of the winning pair, which can spike the economy like mad and makes the various ways to steal or force players to drop them sting a bit less. It’s a volatile game, moreso than almost any MP, but almost all of that is driven by player decisions (rolls permitting) over truly random bullshit. Don’t misunderstand me, these boards do have plenty of bullshit, but nobody plays one of these expecting a bullshit-free experience. If anything I occasionally find myself wanting a smidge more chaos, if only as an option. You know this game doesn’t even have an equivalent of bonus stars at the end? Admittedly you don’t really need them when the board happens after the minigames so it doesn’t sacrifice much tension, but huh! Neat!

Quick note about the way the game ends, because it fixes issues with MP’s that I didn’t even realize existed. Halfway through the game Escalation Time is triggered. All the spaces become more valuable, as do the minigames. This happens again before the final turn to the point where the minigame will basically buy you bricks if you can find them. What pushes this from good to great is how it handles item spaces. MP has always had a lot of dead spaces on its final turn. LP says “wow that’s boring, let’s get rid of all of them and replace them with Chance Time”. The first time I saw this my eyes turned to dinner plates. Landing on a shop is hardly guaranteed and this game’s version of Chance Time is a lot less swingy, capped out at a single gold brick per instance, but fuck that’s a good finale. Turns out you don’t need to play for a goofy list of endgame conditions, you can just make the game itself matter! And be good! I didn’t know!

No minigame list will ever be perfect but LP’s 60 entries make the attempt regardless. There are only free for all and 2v2s here, the former of which are what you’ll be playing at the start of each round, with the latter being reserved for the aforementioned special spaces. Notably, not a single one of them is a speed button masher or, god forbid, stick spinner. I’d roughly group them into 3 Lego-approved categories: piloting some sort of vehicle or movement device, sports, and some sort of control gimmick. We have not achieved Oops All Bangers – some are a bit too simple for my tastes and the platforming games rarely feel great – but at least ¾ of these are solid, and because you vote for your game at the start of each turn your group will only ever have to play a shitty one once. They even managed to make a version of MP’s Bumper Balls that doesn’t suck! My favorites are Museum Mayhem (a riff on Warlords except your castle is a fragile vase), Dirtbike Dash (Excitebike, which I win at), Fancy Lancy (a surprisingly tight space tank shooty-thing that I emphatically do not win at), Slug it Out (a game of keepaway and jukes that’s much funnier than you’d think) and Deep Space Dine (because you can fuck up your friends’ orders and they will yell at you).

This game even succeeds on every relevant technical level. Seamless crossplay across all platforms, including multiple players on one machine locally in online lobbies, across all modes. I’m so used to casual games having dogshit online archtecture that I was genuinely shocked by this. No idea how SMG Studio managed a multiplayer action game with two PCs and two more players sharing a Switch, but they did it by god!

I don’t know if I can adequately explain how unreal it feels to play one of these games and have it just be…good. Not “good if-” or “good but-” or “look I have terminal partyitis and need to roll a 1 to feel anything”, just genuinely unconditionally good! If you aren’t already party pilled I’d be shocked if Lego Party changed your mind, but that’s not for lack of quality, it’s because this is a carefully tuned version of the thing it’s iterating on and that thing is Mario Party, but better. Let it be known that I strongly recommend picking up studs and getting bricked up with your friends.

9/10