By name and nature, Lego Party! will likely always be compared to Mario Party. But after a recent hands-on, it’s very clear: this game is doing its own thing, with well-crafted, diverse party gameplay that brims with cool, new ideas. You can see the love and ingenuity layered into the game, even from the starting menu, where each part of the UI is made of virtual Lego bricks.
Entering any of its many stages – my particular preview comprised the pirate map – you can see careful detail in each brick placement and each wild character design. As noted by the SMG Studio team, in conversation with ScreenHub, developers aimed for accuracy in each new Lego creation, building out worlds and characters that reflect what’s possible in real life. Each Minifigure in the game, and each brick, represents a real-world item, from a variety of sets.
This gives the world of Lego Party! a real tangibility. The builds are nicely realistic, and add to the feeling that you’re playing a virtual-physical party board game with friends. What helps, of course, is playing the game in-person – and feeling all the chills and thrills of attempting to grab Golden Bricks, competing in mini-games, and losing it all at the last second. There’s nothing quite like playing a game co-op with friends.
Each turn, players will roll a dice, and then travel that many squares, in traditional board gaming fashion. The chaos begins when you land on a mini-game or showdown tile, which initiates an array of wild and wonderful Lego-themed party games. What’s most novel is the vast majority feel entirely new, with only shades of inspiration from other, similar party games.
Lego Party! charts a new course in the party game genre
You can see the bones of Crash Bash or Mario Party in multiplayer mini-games where you’re bouncing around, pushing opponents off a game board. There’s a motorbike mini-game that’s partially inspired by Excitebike, and a snowboarding slalom that’s a bit Cool Boarders. But there’s also wilder, more innovative mini-games like one where you attempt to feed a monster by creating a Lego brick burger, or another where you’re wielding a grappling hook to maintain dominance of a moving dance floor.
The grappling hook-based mini-games are particularly fun, with some funny but accurate physics allowing you to fling yourself across stages collecting various items or performing your rawest dance moves.
There’s a real lightness in these mini-games all around, with each designed around a fun central hook, and then Legofied. It’s clear SMG Studio had a bounty of rich ideas here, with each being playtested to near-perfection. A party game is only as good as its mini-games, and every one I tried in my recent preview absolutely hit, sparking a giddy glee (and a smugness in victory that was only barely covered up).
The overworld in the pirate-themed game board also had its own surprises, with players able to make various choices that actually change the board. At certain locations, you can choose to build one of two new features, with this then arriving as a new obstacle for all players. While only a small touch, this feature adds to the overall replayability of the game, and should shake up new rounds.
Of course, you’ve also got an array of dynamic features on each board, such as a Kraken that may fling players in a certain direction, a crab that messes with player progress, and a thief which can steal Gold Bricks on behalf of players who land on his space.
Playing through this particular course, the variety was striking. While it remains to be seen whether repetition will eventually sink in, the diverse array of mini-games, the style of mini-games, and the various changing obstacles in the pirate course, gave me great hope.
Lego Party! well exceeded its station in my preview, encouraging a wonderfully raucous party between strangers, breaking down any barriers of awkwardness in its dazzling sense of fun. This is a game designed to bring people together and share a laugh, and given many of us could do with a laugh in recent times, it arrives as a very important game.
Lego Party! is certainly a game to watch when it launches for PC and consoles on 30 September 2025.
