The Mario Party series is such a devious bastard. Behind the bright, colorful facade that promises some harmless, goofy fun with friends hides a malicious presence that seems to feed off of the suffering of its players. No matter how many players are involved, I have never experienced a game where more than one person actually has a good time. Some of the minigames are genuinely fun. But the context of the core games modes are where the problems lie. Huge piles of bullshit are baked into the very core of this series’ design. With the general quality standards and carefully considered tightness of most of Nintendo’s game design, I can only conclude that this bullshit is intentional and that the developers that worked on these titles are in the service of some dark entity that survives by consuming the emotional fallout of hurt feelings and broken friendships. If you genuinely enjoy the series, my only questions are “Why?”, and “What is your score on the PCL-R?”

To me, this series' design is rotten to its very core. It’s tailor-made to cause as much upset as possible due to several fundamental design choices. I don’t see how this formula could be tweaked without tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch. This isn’t just bullshit heaped onto a foundation with potential. No, this is load-bearing bullshit. Let me explain.

Roll & Move Needs to Fucking Die

In addition to video games, I am an avid enjoyer of tabletop games. My collection includes examples of a spectrum of genres and complexities. This includes more casual dice and push-your-luck stuff—like Deep Blue, Unearth, and King of New York—as well as huge, multi-hour grand strategy games—like Scythe, Eclipse, and Twilight Imperium. What you will absolutely not see in my collection are games built entirely around Roll & Move mechanics. For those unfamiliar, this refers to the main form of gameplay being rolling a die or multiple dice and moving your game piece the resulting number of spaces. The vast majority of the rancid slop on department store shelves are these antiquated bullshit simulators like Monopoly (a game originally designed to be unfair, unfun, and exemplify the potential horrors of late-stage capitalism), The Game of Life, Chutes & Ladders, Candyland, Trouble, and many other sterling examples of poo-poo-caca game design. This can be controversial, but I also think Catan has just enough output randomness malarky to include with this lot, given that multiple turns can end up going entirely nowhere based solely on the whims of the dice RNG. Basically, games of this ilk can essentially play themselves, requiring minimal input from individual players.

In Monopoly, you roll two dice and move where it tells you. If you can afford to buy the property, you should pretty much always do that. If you get an unlucky roll, you pay the cost. Repeat ad nauseum until one player owns everything. The entire game could be played with 0 player input at all using the simplest of algorithms to dictate choices. The game is basically a prolonged exercise in endlessly spinning a wheel to see which flavor of screwjob beyond your control you get next. Don’t ever ask me to play Monopoly. I don’t hate myself enough to subject myself to it anymore. Especially with people who insist on lengthening an already tedious and excruciating game by flooding the game's economy when they allow players to collect money when they land on Free Parking. Cash is supposed to be a limited resource in order to force players to resort to property trading, you fucking dumbasses.

The problem is that to the casual player, this is just what board games do. It’s like their whole deal. But in reality, it’s just what bad and highly antiquated board games do; Roll & Move first became popular in the mid 1800’s. I’m not saying that old ideas are inherently bad—games like Chess and Checkers have withstood the test of time as well, but that’s because their mechanics offer actual depth and meaningful decision-making. There are multitudes of board games—most of which you won’t find on the shelves of Target or Walmart—that feature entirely unique and carefully refined mechanics, often without a single die in the box. And even when modern games do use dice or other forms of randomness, they use them in ways that don’t completely undermine the concept of player strategy. For the life of me, I cannot understand why games like Monopoly are still bestsellers. Tabletop game design has progressed miles beyond these somehow-still-popular antiques, yet the general public’s perception of what a board game is has remained firmly rooted in the past. And that is a huge part of the problem with Mario Party’s design: it adopts these godawful mechanics simply because, in the zeitgeist, “it’s just what board games do”, and Mario Party is trying to evoke board games.

But why is Roll & Move so shit? What’s so wrong with it?

Well, buckle up and listen, fucko.

Input Randomness vs. Output Randomness

In game design—both of the electronic and analog variety—randomness can be an effective way to inject unexpected twists into a game and facilitate more interesting decision making. However, the effectiveness hinges entirely on the nature and implementation of the randomness. At a fundamental level, there are two overarching categories:

Output Randomness

This refers to mechanics where the outcome of a player’s decision is determined by chance. The player makes a choice first, and then a random factor (like a die roll or coin flip) decides what happens from there. A perfect example is the combat system in XCOM. When you choose to fire at an enemy, the game shows your hit chance (say, 95%), and you commit to the action—only to watch your soldier miss at point-blank range because RNG said so. As great as the XCOM series is, this hit mechanic is undeniably its most rage-inducing element, even for fans like me who love the games overall. Whiffing a nearly guaranteed shot feels not just punishing, but arbitrary, especially when the stakes are high.

Roll & Move is one of the single worst offenders in this category because it fundamentally undermines the concept of player agency and strategy. Your entire turn is generally reliant on getting a good roll from the get go. You might have a good plan in mind, but carrying it out might be entirely contingent on getting lucky with the dice. Going back to the demon-spawned shitshow that is Monopoly, there is essentially no meaningful decision making involved. Even games with a strong backbone—like the deductive puzzle at the heart of Clue/Cluedo—can still be completely ruined by bad rolls because the game relies on rolling dice to determine how far you can move. Games like this instantly become much more genuinely strategic and enjoyable when you adopt house rules that completely remove the RNG movement. None of this is to say that dice rolls have no place in games. But in general, they seems to work best when there are other strategic factors at play, like systems that afford some amount of control over the resulting values. This could take the form of mechanics that allow you to choose what type of dice to roll, nudge their values up or down, or make strategic re-rolls. The problems appear when the dice rolls completely dictate the turn regardless of player intent or input.

From a psychological perspective, if a game is going to utilize Output Randomness, players will generally be much more receptive when something good unexpectedly happens rather than an unexpected bad thing. For example, in the roguelike Into the Breach, one of the main points of the game is to protect buildings from giant bug monsters. You should always assume that an enemy attack on a building will be bad, but there is also a percentage chance that attacks will be deflected and the building will survive unscathed. You should always try to protect buildings whenever possible, but the mechanic is a nice little safety net to potentially catch you if there are holes in your careful planning and strategy. The game’s mechanics are otherwise clearly telegraphed and deterministic beyond a bit of Input Randomness in enemy configurations. Speaking of which…

Input Randomness

This is the inverse: randomness shapes the situation, but the player decides how to respond. A clear-cut example is Dicey Dungeons. At the start of a battle turn, you roll several dice. Then, you choose how to allocate them across your abilities. Some tools require odd or even dice, some want specific values, and others let you manipulate or re-roll the dice before committing.

Yes, it’s still RNG-driven, but the point is that you’re responding to the roll, not helplessly watching it dictate the outcome. The agency lies in how you adapt.

Another common example is drawing cards, whether in tabletop games or video game deckbuilders. You might not control which cards you draw, but you absolutely control how you play them. The tension of uncertainty in setup, control in execution is what makes Input Randomness generally feel more fair and engaging.

Procedural generation is also a form of Input Randomness. In games like Spelunky or Rogue Legacy, the level layout is randomly generated. But once the run begins, it’s entirely up to the player to figure out how to navigate it. The challenge is fresh each time, but the player remains in charge of how to approach it.

Why It Can Be a Problem: A Case Study in Bullshit

With these distinctions established, we’re finally ready to talk about Mario Party. The series is a consistent proprietor of Roll & Move chicanery, arguably one of the worst forms of the already fraught concept of Output Randomness. But it doesn’t stop there. On top of this, piles of nonsense Output Randomness are heaped onto every other corner of the game. You could win every single minigame, make all of the best possible decisions given your circumstances, and still lose by a landslide just because the game’s very DNA is entirely coded with fucking bullshit RNG. Players can randomly gain Stars and coins for doing fuck all. You can lose everything because you just happened to roll a move onto a Bowser space. Some minigames are genuinely skill based, but others are pure luck or are a complete wash if you get paired up with a CPU player. You could carefully plan your route through the board, curating and saving specific items in preparation for a specific situation, but how close you get to actualizing that plan is entirely dependent on whether you actually roll higher than a fucking 2 for 5 turns in a row.

More often than not, these games thrust their victims into a realm of madness and despair, where one player favored by Lady Luck cackles from their position at the top while the others flop about in the eternal grip of compassionless misfortune. Even then, the tables could entirely flip at the end when they hand out Bonus Stars for doing absolutely arbitrary things that weren’t telegraphed beforehand, like landing on the most Event Spaces (which, mind you, you have very little control over anyway because your movement is still based on fucking dice rolls). Yes, there are modes in the recent entries that reduce some of the bullshit—like telegraphing or outright removing Bonus Stars—but it doesn’t fundamentally change the structure of the game. As long as it’s based on Roll & Move, every system built on top of it is inherently undercut. The only reason I can think of that people might enjoy this type of design is because they are chaotic anarchists that just want to watch the world burn and descend into a state where nihilism reigns and absolutely nothing matters.

In summary: Fuck Mario Party. In my opinion, this series absolutely does not deserve its historically high sales and popularity. Is it the minigames? Sure, some are fun, but that's like eating a Banana Split where the ice cream is made of dog shit just because you enjoy the bananas and cherries. Every time a fucking idiot like me inexplicably buys every single entry available for the Nintendo Switch, we’re sending a message to Nintendo that it’s time to lube up and fuck us in the ass again. But maybe… madness is all there is. Maybe madness should be embraced. It’s all there ever was. It’s all there ever will be. We cannot escape the party because we are the party. We are its spectators. We are its victims. We are its dominatrices. All is Mario Party, and Mario Party is nothing, therefore we are nothing. Fuck Mario Party. Praise be unto Mario Party.