- Board Difficulty
- Average
- Recommended Turns
- 20
- Custom Events
- Yes (Unique)
- Custom Music
- No
- Playable on N64 Hardware
- Yes
- Space Count
- 66
- Theme
- Nintendo
The Board
Game Night is a custom Mario Party 3 game board that is inspired by bombastic get-togethers with your best friends and your favorite games. My roommate and I have been working on this board for nearly 3 years now, and we're very excited to share it with everyone.
The board is littered with classic gaming treasures, coins from around the world, and the occasional delicious beverage. Navigate a simple layout that offers interesting strategic choices at each fork. And yes, it's fully tested on real hardware!
We made the art for the board by covering a table with a black cloth and then filling it with our Nintendo collections... as well as a few things we like to have at our annual Christmas Mario Party game. =) Then, we used paint.net to rearrange the spaces as we playtested. We hope you feel like the Mario Party characters have been shrunken down and get to explore a towering tribute to LAN parties with your friends.
Custom Events
Game Night also comes with a bevy of custom events! You can check out each below, or leave the spoilers collapsed so you can go in blind. We'll get these uploaded to the forum so everyone can make use of them just as soon as we clean up some of the code.
We'd like to give a special thank you to Airsola, Rain, Justin, and others from the PartyPlanner64 Discord for all their help and advice on these events.
The first event that all players will come across is the Ancient Mew Card. You'll earn nothing but a cryptic read on your first pass by. However, Ancient Mew shares an interest in mystery and will reward curious players with coins based on the number of Happening spaces they land on.
This functions a bit like a "Pass GO" event, but it asymmetrically rewards players who are competing for the Happening Star, making that a bit more of a viable path to Super Stardom.
In the southwest corner of the board, you'll pass an N64 that's hooked up to a TV playing... Mario Party! We thought this art feature would be fun to bring to life by letting you imagine you are walking by the console that is actually running your game. So when Koopa Kid pokes his head up from behind the console and offers to swap some cords around on your behalf, you know it's going to have a big effect!
The custom event here won't actually swap your controllers (though we playtested that during development), but it will allow you to swap the turn order of two players on the board. The most common use is to set yourself up as the person who will be rolling first every turn... but you can also send a rival back down to roll last, or even use it in certain situations to let someone roll twice in a row and snake a star. And, of course, if you don't want to make your friends mad with your selection, you can even let Koopa Kid pick the victims for himself so they can't blame you.
A special shoutout to Rain for figuring out how to manually trigger scene transitions, which was the critical piece to let the UI reload to show the underlying swap. And a big thanks to Justin for sharing his research into this type of event, including the Cursed Mushroom bit edge case.
This is a simple little event that requires the player to land on one of the two Happening Spaces in front of the SNES Mini console. Landing here will grant you a random item for free, making it similar to an Item Space but with less control over what you get.
The primary operation for this space (giving an item to a player) is from Gwonam's Get Random Item, and then we're just playing a simple flavor message along with the Joy animation on top of it.
Landing on one of the three happening spaces on the Nintendo Gamecube will prompt you with a random question as part of the Game Night Quiz! There are 48 questions total and the questions cover multiple subjects. This can include facts and objects seen around the board, the year a game was released, the origins of the playable cast in Mario Party 3, and more. Get the answer right, and you'll net yourself 10 coins!
I based the design of this event on the Airsolan's Triva Quiz event. However, I started the event from scratch in C and brought some significant upgrades to help on repeat plays.
For example, the board starts on a random question each time you play. It provides a different ordering of questions each match. And, it randomizes the order of the answers to keep the questions fresh.
We even taught the CPU's how to take the quiz - based on their difficulty, they'll have a different chance of selecting the correct answer, so your hard CPU's will outperform your Easy and Normal CPU's.
When I upload this quiz to the Events section, I'll also include a generic "Nintendo Quiz" that still has 48 Nintendo Questions and has all the Game Night-specific questions removed from it.
Players who brave the depravity of Boo's Boulevard will be met with Boo himself, who will steal coins and stars as always. That said, be careful when heading this direction. Boo is sandwiched between two Happening Spaces.
Getting lost in Boo's Boulevard
The first space represents your character partying too hard and getting lost in the alley, which marks you with a Reverse Mushroom. Landing on this space can turn a simple trip to Boo into a multi-turn detour, so players should be very careful to parktake in Boo's delights with moderation. =)
This space uses SluggishShroom's Reverse Mushroomizer event, and then plays a simple message for flavor.
Partying too hard in Boo's Boulevard
The second space represents the hangover your character might have after one too many drinks on Boo(ze) Boulevard, marking you with a Poison Mushroom... and that Cursed Dice Block on the next turn might just force you to stumble into the Bowser or Game Guy spaces right behind it.
This space uses SluggishShroom's Poison Mushroomizer event, and then plays a simple message for flavor.
Turn Recommendations:
We think there's a lot of fun to be had on this board. We balanced the coin and star economy to run hot, so expect a volatile game with lots of opportunities to scheme against your friends.
If you'd like to see a 20-Turn game in action, you can watch it here! This is from our first release candidate of the board, so you will see a few additional spaces and more Hidden Blocks than the download - but it is extremely close to the final version.
We hope you can get some buddies together and have a great Game Night!
Game Night is a custom Mario Party 3 game board that is inspired by bombastic get-togethers with your best friends and your favorite games. My roommate and I have been working on this board for nearly 3 years now, and we're very excited to share it with everyone.
The board is littered with classic gaming treasures, coins from around the world, and the occasional delicious beverage. Navigate a simple layout that offers interesting strategic choices at each fork. And yes, it's fully tested on real hardware!
We made the art for the board by covering a table with a black cloth and then filling it with our Nintendo collections... as well as a few things we like to have at our annual Christmas Mario Party game. =) Then, we used paint.net to rearrange the spaces as we playtested. We hope you feel like the Mario Party characters have been shrunken down and get to explore a towering tribute to LAN parties with your friends.
Custom Events
Game Night also comes with a bevy of custom events! You can check out each below, or leave the spoilers collapsed so you can go in blind. We'll get these uploaded to the forum so everyone can make use of them just as soon as we clean up some of the code.
We'd like to give a special thank you to Airsola, Rain, Justin, and others from the PartyPlanner64 Discord for all their help and advice on these events.
The first event that all players will come across is the Ancient Mew Card. You'll earn nothing but a cryptic read on your first pass by. However, Ancient Mew shares an interest in mystery and will reward curious players with coins based on the number of Happening spaces they land on.
This functions a bit like a "Pass GO" event, but it asymmetrically rewards players who are competing for the Happening Star, making that a bit more of a viable path to Super Stardom.
In the southwest corner of the board, you'll pass an N64 that's hooked up to a TV playing... Mario Party! We thought this art feature would be fun to bring to life by letting you imagine you are walking by the console that is actually running your game. So when Koopa Kid pokes his head up from behind the console and offers to swap some cords around on your behalf, you know it's going to have a big effect!
The custom event here won't actually swap your controllers (though we playtested that during development), but it will allow you to swap the turn order of two players on the board. The most common use is to set yourself up as the person who will be rolling first every turn... but you can also send a rival back down to roll last, or even use it in certain situations to let someone roll twice in a row and snake a star. And, of course, if you don't want to make your friends mad with your selection, you can even let Koopa Kid pick the victims for himself so they can't blame you.
A special shoutout to Rain for figuring out how to manually trigger scene transitions, which was the critical piece to let the UI reload to show the underlying swap. And a big thanks to Justin for sharing his research into this type of event, including the Cursed Mushroom bit edge case.
This is a simple little event that requires the player to land on one of the two Happening Spaces in front of the SNES Mini console. Landing here will grant you a random item for free, making it similar to an Item Space but with less control over what you get.
The primary operation for this space (giving an item to a player) is from Gwonam's Get Random Item, and then we're just playing a simple flavor message along with the Joy animation on top of it.
Landing on one of the three happening spaces on the Nintendo Gamecube will prompt you with a random question as part of the Game Night Quiz! There are 48 questions total and the questions cover multiple subjects. This can include facts and objects seen around the board, the year a game was released, the origins of the playable cast in Mario Party 3, and more. Get the answer right, and you'll net yourself 10 coins!
I based the design of this event on the Airsolan's Triva Quiz event. However, I started the event from scratch in C and brought some significant upgrades to help on repeat plays.
For example, the board starts on a random question each time you play. It provides a different ordering of questions each match. And, it randomizes the order of the answers to keep the questions fresh.
We even taught the CPU's how to take the quiz - based on their difficulty, they'll have a different chance of selecting the correct answer, so your hard CPU's will outperform your Easy and Normal CPU's.
When I upload this quiz to the Events section, I'll also include a generic "Nintendo Quiz" that still has 48 Nintendo Questions and has all the Game Night-specific questions removed from it.
Players who brave the depravity of Boo's Boulevard will be met with Boo himself, who will steal coins and stars as always. That said, be careful when heading this direction. Boo is sandwiched between two Happening Spaces.
Getting lost in Boo's Boulevard
The first space represents your character partying too hard and getting lost in the alley, which marks you with a Reverse Mushroom. Landing on this space can turn a simple trip to Boo into a multi-turn detour, so players should be very careful to parktake in Boo's delights with moderation. =)
This space uses SluggishShroom's Reverse Mushroomizer event, and then plays a simple message for flavor.
Partying too hard in Boo's Boulevard
The second space represents the hangover your character might have after one too many drinks on Boo(ze) Boulevard, marking you with a Poison Mushroom... and that Cursed Dice Block on the next turn might just force you to stumble into the Bowser or Game Guy spaces right behind it.
This space uses SluggishShroom's Poison Mushroomizer event, and then plays a simple message for flavor.
Sorry, no gif for this one! We found that, due to the lower number of solid spaces, players were hitting hidden blocks at a high rate. So, we included an event that takes hitting Hidden Blocks down to a standard, lower level. That means the board will play normally, but just calling out we're doing a little work in the backend here to help out!
Turn Recommendations:
We think there's a lot of fun to be had on this board. We balanced the coin and star economy to run hot, so expect a volatile game with lots of opportunities to scheme against your friends.
- Play 20 turns if you'd like a fast, high-resource scramble where minigames give a clear item advantage and players only have a handful of laps to attempt comeback mechanics. We think this one is best if you have CPU's in the mix or just want a fast game that goes down smooth.
- Play 35 turns if you'd like an arms race between players converting minigame coins into item power and players converting board event power into star steals. We think this one is best between four human players who can be strategic about bonus stars and the intentional use of Boo.
- We haven't really tested 50 turns, so if you give it a try, please let us know how it goes! We do suspect the economy will get a little volatile since we didn't target this turn count... but we think you at least won't be bored. =)
If you'd like to see a 20-Turn game in action, you can watch it here! This is from our first release candidate of the board, so you will see a few additional spaces and more Hidden Blocks than the download - but it is extremely close to the final version.
We hope you can get some buddies together and have a great Game Night!
