I have been going through the library and playing as many different Mario Party’s as i can. I have to say 3 and 6 are pretty awesome. I don’t like 7 or 10 that much at all since they changed so much about the game. What’s your favorite Mario Party games?
If you want it to be more skill based, turn off bonus stars and adjust the difficulty of the minigames to the harder ones. The bonus stars are notorious for ruining your run if you were playing great all game, but someone just got awarded 2 stars, and now you are in 2nd place. Mario Party 6 has these options, so that would be a good start.
Disabling bonus stars is a good point. For the difficulty, not sure if that would work well: The problem is some of the players are inevitably casuals, so increasing the difficulty just means the very narrow part of the game that isn’t as random - the mini-games - becomes not fun for them. And the Monopoly-style turn-based board play takes sooooo long, you can’t really strategize where to go.
I really do think a Mario Party game with only mini-games so everyone plays all the time would be incredible. But again, maybe I’m just describing Warioware…
I completely forgot about these options, that’s a great point.