We recently streamed a few hours of LEGO Party! On Gaming Tavern, and hopefully you can see just how much fun we had. This is a game that is ideal for both families and friends to play, although one of which might get a bit more…explicit… than the other. Mario Party is a clear influence, though SMG Studios do a good job of offering up their own spin on the party-boardgame idea to make it stand up in its own right.
The main attraction is the boardgame mode. Here, up to four players (either local or online) take it in turns to roll dice, move about a board, and compete in minigames to earn vital, game-winning Golden Bricks. There are four boards on offer; Pirate, Ninjago, Theme Park, and Space. Each one brings a different flavour not just visually, but in the mechanics of the boards. The pirate one lets us build extra areas as we go around to explore, whereas the Theme Park has a central area that we can build off of that offers extra challenges in return for a Golden Brick. It’s a smart way of giving the boards unique personalities, and because these are optional can really make a difference in each game.
We played up to 10 rounds per game, though the option is there to go for much longer or shorter. Each round sees players stopping the dice roll on a number, moving that many spaces, and dealing with whatever that space throws up, from simply handing out studs (the currency used in game for various things) to a randomised reward, or even losing studs or items. If you’ve played Mario Party this will all be familiar enough, and as the game progresses the board changes with new spaces introduced to add some chaos to the final few rounds.
Once all four have played, we enter into a minigame chosen either by committee or randomly. These are short blasts of fun, and the variety on offer is massive. Some have us trying to follow a shape on the ground after it vanishes, others are simple races to a goal, while others still randomly pair up teams of two to battle it out in co-op tasks. Much like MP, LEGO Party lives and dies on how fun – and fair – these are, and while we haven’t played them all, the large selection we have so far have proven to be fun, and ripe for great banter when one player just slides a victory in. One that sticks in my mind was a bike race up and over rocky terrain. In the practice (all games let players practice before the real deal) I did well, but immediately crashed out on the actual event, causing much (expected) ribbing from the others.
Win a minigame, and we’re granted an amount of studs. The studs are used to buy items in the shops, open up shortcuts and build new areas, and most importantly buy the Golden Bricks when we land on the space that the golden minifig is currently occupying. At 50 studs a piece it’s not cheap, but if we have enough we can buy it there and then before he moves to a new space entirely. We can also land on some spaces that let us steal studs or bricks from others, and the chaos this offers when people are pleading for you not to steal from them is hilarious.
The winner is the player with the most Golden Bricks at the end of the game, or whoever has the most studs in the case of tie. This is perhaps my only real niggle with LEGO Party!, as it’s apparent who has one often before the final few turns. There are ways to change that in the special spaces or minigames, but it’s harder to do here than MP. It’s also missing the bonus stars that add a random element to MP finales. In that game, players would be rewarded with a handful of stars based on unknown random stats like most blue spaces landed on, or most minigames ones. With no random Golden Bricks at the end, it can feel a bit anticlimactic as the outro is teasing the winner although we all already know who won. I get it may be a bit fairer for the younger audience or new players here, but even having it as an option would have been a nice touch.
Elsewhere, we can just play the minigames on their own for various amounts of rounds without the boardgame aspect. These are smartly broken into categories, and choosing ones that fit the skill level of the players is easily done. We can also choose from a huge library of prebuilt LEGO characters, or craft our own using all manner of parts. This will no doubt be popular with the younger players as they can build all manner of whacky minifigs to use.
Conclusion
LEGO Party! is a solid, fun party game for families or friends. The boards are well designed and offer enough differences to make playing them repeatedly interesting, and the minigames are just the right balance of chaos and execution to be laugh out loud fun. A bit more chaos at the end of a game with bonus bricks would have been welcome, but otherwise this is a great alternative to Mario and his pals’ boardgame shenanigans.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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