Mario Party™ Surprise!!!™—A new addition to the Mario Party™ franchise! It is a free-to-start online service title that is exclusive to Nintendo Switch Online™ members. The game's main mode, the Surprise Party mode functions very similarly to Mario Party™: Star Rush™'s main mode Toad Scramble, where players are able to move freely all over the board and each character has their own dice block in addition to the standard dice.
Unique to this iteration, all characters have favored minigames and boards, meaning that some characters will automatically do better than others in these areas! This is because all characters, alongside most minigames and several boards, are unlocked by the Surprise Box, which acts as this game's gacha system. Getting duplicates of characters, minigames, and boards can be used to level the originals up, unlocking benefits and features not previously seen in their previous versions. Examples include Mario™ having a Dash Mushroom™ at the start of a game, a certain minigame being able to reward more Coins™, and a new section of a board being unlocked.
Stars™ are used as a premium currency, making it all the more important to win at Mario Party™! 100 Stars™ are required to open the standard Surprise Box which guarantees 5 minigames, a 1% chance rate of a board, and a 0.3% rate of a character. Players can opt to pay a real fee of at maximum $15.99 to compensate for any missing Stars™. In addition to a daily free Surprise Box, compatible Super Mario™ and Super Smash Bros.™ series amiibo™ can be used up to 4 times daily to open amiibo™ Surprise Boxes. Characters such as Mario™, Luigi™, Princess Peach™, Toad™, Yoshi™, and Bowser™ have a 5% chance rate in these Surprise Boxes if their respective amiibo™ are used.
Players that download the game will immediately be gifted one of these 4 characters—Yellow Toad™, Blue Toad™, Red Toad™, and Green Toad™, 5 random minigames, and the beginning board—Mushroom Crossing, all for free! To access the rest of the game however, players will need to pay a one-time real fee of $59.99. As an online service, each week the game will give access to one spotlight board that is accessible to everyone who has paid the one-time $59.99 fee, including players who have not unlocked the board from Surprise Boxes. Additionally, new characters may occasionally be released as a one week timed exclusive. The game also offers a single player story mode experience that is heavily inspired by the gameplay style seen in Mario Party 9™ and Mario Party 10™.
The game also offers a service called the VIP Pass that costs a real monthly payment of $4.99 where members get get exclusive benefits such as discounted deals across the board, as well as additional exclusive spotlight boards and characters each week. For example, Surprise Boxes will only cost 75 Stars™ or a maximum real time fee of $11.99.
The game overall is a timed exclusive for Nintendo Switch Online™ members that will be available for roughly a year. The online services will last for another 6 months, before being permanently terminated with the game data being designed to be automatically deleted or rendered useless on all Nintendo Switch™ family of systems on its final day.
