Mario Party: Island Tour

Mario Party: Island Tour was the first entry of the popular party game series designed purely for a handheld, which meant a significant rethinking of the traditional formula. Instead of the classic sequential dice roll across one large, open game board, the game offers several smaller, more linear routes with their own rules and branching paths, aiming to work better in the shorter play sessions typical of portable consoles. Each route thus has its own identity and brings a different type of challenge, from a pure race to advance as quickly as possible to more tactical decisions about which way to go next and how to budget a limited number of dice rolls.

The game boards contain inventive elements - from a route full of boss battles, through a path where players choose direction using special dice, to a board game inspired by the familiar game of memory. The minigames, the core of the entire series, make use of the 3DS's touchscreen, microphone, and gyroscope, and offer the typical mix of reflex, logic, and competitive challenges for two to four players, and thanks to the Download Play feature a single game cartridge is enough for multiple players to take part, making it easier to play among a group of friends without everyone needing their own copy.

Critics and fans received the series with mixed feelings - some players praised the boldness of trying a new approach and the inventive game boards, while others criticized the series for moving away from traditional free movement across the map and for a more limited character selection compared to previous console entries. Today Island Tour is seen as an interesting, if not unreservedly successful, experiment within the series, one that showed how difficult it is to transfer the philosophy of big social games to a smaller screen without losing their essence, and many of its ideas later appeared in subsequent entries in the series, albeit in a modified and less radical form. For collectors and loyal series fans it remains an interesting, if not strictly essential, chapter in its history.