Mario Party 5 - Gameplay

Gameplay

Mario Party 5 retains the fundamental gameplay featured in previous installments, which is based upon a themed board game played by characters of the Mario series. The player's objective is to obtain the most stars by the end of the board game, which are usually purchased when landing on the designated star space on the game board. Coins are earned mainly by winning minigames, which occur after all players have rolled the die. "Party Mode" is the main multiplayer mode, and involves four characters competing in a standard board game either independently or in opposing pairs. As with its predecessors, players can adjust the number of turns in a game by multiples of five, and determine the difficulty of artificial intelligence opponents.

Mario Party 5 features ten playable characters, including three additional characters to the series: Toad, Boo, and Koopa Kid. Hudson omitted Donkey Kong as a playable character from the series in this installment, instead featuring him in the "DK space", which initiates an event granting the possibility of a star or coins whenever landed on. While the series' predecessors used item shops as a means to obtain items, Mario Party 5 introduces the capsule system. Capsules are containers that hold a single item which are acquired when passing the "Capsule Machine" on the board. The items contained within them serve a variety of purposes, from increasing the range of the die and thus movement, to deducting ten coins from an opponent. The capsules can only be thrown up to ten spaces ahead of the current position. During a game, the gameplay is altered for the last five turns with the options selected randomly via a roulette wheel; such changes include tripling the coin benefit or deficit from coloured spaces.

The game's boards incorporate the theme of the Dream Depot, with each having "Dream" at the end of the board's title, except for the "Bowser's Nightmare" board. Each board consists of multiple types of spaces, some of which granting special types of minigames that cannot be accessed regularly. Some spaces, specifically "happening" spaces, will incorporate the relevant theme; for example, a giant robot resembling Mecha Bowser will shoot any character back to the start when landing on its "happening" space in the Toy Dream board.

Players can choose to play minigames separate from the board game context via "Minigame Mode". The minigames are categorized by their character structure, with "4-player", "1 vs. 3", and "2 vs. 2" available. Besides these standard versions, there are also the "DK" and "Bowser" minigames, which are themed to reflect their titular character; "Battle" minigames are retained from Mario Party 4. The set of minigames are available without a structure ("Free play") in this mode, but can be formatted into tournaments and separate objectives like in "Mini-game circuit", involving the characters winning minigames to reach the finish line first. In "Bonus mode", a set of three larger games that do not appear in usual play can be accessed; this involves a card-based board game ("Card party"), as well as Beach volleyball and Ice hockey.

Mario Party 5 introduced the "Super-Duel Mode", a game involving the player assembling and controlling a combat vehicle. Each component of the vehicle can be bought separately; these do not necessarily have to fit with other parts stylistically, and contribute to the vehicle's general statistics regarding fields such as health and speed. Once the vehicle is assembled and named, it can engage AI or human opponents in a single match or in tournaments. Variants of this are available, including a capture the flag mode and another requiring the player to shoot mechanical rabbits.