Skill
Strategy
Luck

These are the 3 core pillars every Mario Party game attempts to balance themselves around. Skill is required to win the majority of minigames, which will help give players massive coins leads to help them afford stars (and in later games, items). Strategy is required for the board game element. Players need to make smart decisions in order to traverse these perilous landscapes littered with spaces that can do good or ill when landed upon. Luck is the x-factor element that keeps everyone on their toes. It's when a player lands on Chance Time and has the ability to change the tides of battle in an instant. The final outcome is rarely predictable when everyone is playing their A game.

Everyone has a different idea on how important these cores are to the overall party experience. Some will insist that Mario Party is best as a vehicle for schadenfreude and little else, while others only desire the minigames and dislike any level of luck. Like most multiplayer titles, Mario Party only thrives when you're playing with the right people. People that can all agree on what makes for a fun party game. For me and my friend group, all three core pillars are equally important. A player's talent for sweeping minigames, knowledge for board traversal, and ability to go with the punches should all be rewarded in roughly equal regards. When one element is underplayed, or missing altogether, the whole experience tumbles.

Considering it was one of the first party games of its kind, I won't blame the developers at Hudson Soft for not striking this balance perfectly. What I will blame them for is making a utterly dull and uneventful title. Mario Party 1's largest issue is the lack of player agency. With boards that are mostly linear, and a complete lack of items to use, players rarely get to make an actual decision during the board game element. Most turns amount to each player rolling the dice and accepting whatever outcome the game gives them. It's a very hands-off experience where laughter and boasting in later Mario Party games is replaced by dead air. When you end up screwing over your buddy, you're rarely able to say you intended to do so. This lack of agency is compounded on by two of MP1's unique spaces. One is a 50/50 where you are either given an extra roll or have your next turn taken from you. Removing a player's turn should never be a punishment in a party game. All it accomplishes is removing one of the players from the antics and likely leading to them losing interest. The other space, Solo Minigame, is even worse. Does the idea of watching one of your friends play a minigame you and your other buds have no say in sound enticing? Regardless of the outcome, it's another element that distances the non-participants away from the game. Despite games of MP1 wrapping up quicker than most later installments, they often feel longer thanks to having so much downtime where no one, not even the current turn's player, feels like they're making a meaningful difference.

So the board element is a dud, but that still leaves us with 50 minigames. Sadly, this has got to be the most uneven batch of minigames I've ever played. Far, far too many of these games are unbalanced to a comical degree, making many of these a hopeless battle for one or several players. Perhaps it adds to the toxic chaos so many people believe to be the point of Mario Party, but I'd rather the cheering and screaming be from players actually outplaying eachother and not just from being given an unfair advantage. If you need an example of how dire some of these minigames are, one of them is a 1 vs 3 game where the one player picks a pipe to send a chest of coins down, hopefully onto themselves, while the three other players just... watch. That's the whole minigame.

One interesting element to the minigames is how rewards for winning vary depending on the minigame. Some minigames have a set reward for winning, while others let player earn bonus cash by collecting coins during the actual minigame. Some minigames will even punish losing players by taking away coins. It's unique, but let down by the previously mentioned selection of minigame. It's bad enough to loose at a poorly designed minigame but it stings even more when the game actually takes coins away from you as if you had any say in the matter.

Really, outside of the short length of most board playthroughs and the overly simplistic board elements meaning you don't have to explain much to a newcomer, there's very little to raise this game beyond trash status. If Mario Party 2 didn't immediately improve upon this game's foundation to a legendary degree I'd probably be even less forgiving of this game's faults. At least it lead to some great games down the line.