Lego Party Fixes Mario Party’s Biggest Pain Point
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Mario Party is a game lots of players love, but often not without reservations. The big knock against the series has long been its late-game antics, which can render strategy meaningless by creating huge swings that can suddenly shuffle the standings, regardless of how well or poorly you’ve been playing all along. Handing out bonus stars like Oprah gifting her audience with cars just doesn’t make for a good virtual board game.
It’s also not so predictable which of the many categories of minigames will be involved in any Mario Party endgame moment, and as a result, not always so much fun to play, even while the rest of a session might be enjoyable. Lego Party, a similar minigame-laden multiplayer party game, is intended to be similar to Mario Party but without that annoyance for players, allowing them to strategize more reliably.
The team behind Lego Party removed the concept of bonus stars (gold bricks in this case) from their take on the party minigame genre, because the team understood that having late-game bonuses that can invalidate playing well in the early game is not an enjoyable mechanic. “I just don’t like them,” SMG Studio project director Mark Fennell told me bluntly. It feels like randomness added where it doesn’t belong. And I can say its absence was appreciated in my Lego Party demo at Summer Game Fest 2025.
