The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
Minigames can be selected individually or played in groups as part of a multi-event competition. You can compete to see who can win the most, who can accumulate the highest score, or who can navigate a staircase where a win moves you upward and a loss moves you downward. A fourth option serves up random pieces of a bridge for every win. The first person to collect all of the pieces and complete a bridge is the winner. Of course, a Mario Party game wouldn't be a Mario Party game without a turn-based board game mode. The one in Mario Party DS offers five different game boards and provides a random minigame at the end of each turn to dole out coins that can be used to buy items and stars. The design is easy enough to get the hang of. You roll dice to move ahead, you land on squares to collect coins, and you use items to stack the dice or lay traps for your opponents. At the end of the game, the player with the most stars gets to go on to try the boss minigame. Typically, one romp through the board game mode takes about 30 minutes to complete.
Mario Party DS is best enjoyed with one, two, or three other people. However, if you want to play against the artificial intelligence, you definitely can. Be aware, though, that the AI puts up a decent, natural challenge only on the hard setting. On the easy and normal settings, the AI is a pushover, and on the expert setting you will almost never beat the AI, which has an uncanny ability to move at top speed and knows exactly where hazards are going to appear. For solo play, the cartridge also includes a story mode that organizes the five board game stages into a quest of sorts. As the story goes, Bowser has miniaturized Mario and friends using his miniaturizer rod, so now you have to pick a character and work through Bowzer's minions by beating the different game boards. Progress is saved after every turn and at the end of each board, which means you can easily take a break and resume the quest later. If you lose, you don't have to replay the boards you've already won. You do have to replay the current board, though, which is a bit of a bummer.
Alternatively, if you get tired of the individual minigames and the story mode, the cartridge also offers six different stand-alone puzzle games. Three of them are Mario-themed takes on Columns, Puyo Puyo, and Panel de Pon--with minor changes to protect the guilty. Of the other three, one involves rotating a cylinder to catch and match marbles, one involves grabbing pieces off of a conveyer belt to fill in a rectangular container, and the last involves rotating and matching like-colored groups of triangles in a never-ending cluster of triangles. If you've played Hexic on Xbox Live Arcade, this last one is eerily similar to that. While these stand-alone puzzle games seem out of place in a Mario Party game, they're actually nice time wasters that can easily take the place of Tetris DS or Planet Puzzle League on those long bus trips.
Mario Party DS is an outright blast when played with other people, and since you need only one cartridge to enjoy everything, the odds are good that you'll be able to entice your DS-owning friends to play with you. As a solo endeavor, challenging the computer opponents does get old eventually. However, between all of the different minigames, play modes, and puzzle games, it'll be a while before you condemn the cartridge to your storage shelf.
