Bring your amiibo Plus One to Mario Party: Star Rush

Mario Party: Star Rush takes the series back to handhelds, but it has a few clever tricks to hopefully be more successful than past portable installments. The biggest change to the formula is that all players will now take their turns simultaneously! If you don’t own your own copy of the game, you’ll still be able to play with friends who do by downloading a special bit of software called Mario Party: Star Rush – Party Guest. Once you’ve played some games with your friends you’ll be able to try out a few minigames in singleplayer mode. At least one of you needs to own the full game, however. The full game features a few different modes, which Nintendo have provided some new details on.

In Toad Scramble, everyone plays as a Toad and must join forces with other characters by crossing paths with them on the board. Each character will have a special ability you can utilise to collect extra coins and deal extra damage to bosses. This is one of the modes that will support amiibo, however you can only do so in singleplayer mode. If you tap an amiibo of a playable character, they’ll join your team right from the get-go and bring a special item along too. This includes the upcoming waves of Super Mario amiibo like Waluigi and the Boo that glows in the dark. If your amiibo has save data from Mario Party 10 on Wii U, they’ll bring along special dice to give you a further advantage. You might have noticed an amiibo carrying a special dice over in the Star Rush gameplay that was shown off in the 3DS-focused Nintendo Direct:

Coinathlon mode removes the dice, and instead has players compete in a succession of minigames. Completing minigames will push you around the board faster and give you more coins, so you’ll need to make sure to win as many as you can! Finally, Balloon Burst mode is more like traditional Mario Party gameplay. You’ll need to earn coins to trade for Stars, as the player with the most Stars at the end wins. All players still move at the same time, but you only have a limited number of turns that you can take so you’ll need to strategise in order to use them as effectively as you can.

The game will have over 50 minigames and 7 gameplay modes, which you can also play in singleplayer mode against AI opponents. You can choose from four difficulty levels for the AI.

Mario Party: Star Rush will release October 8th for 3DS. If you don’t have a New 3DS or New 3DSXL then you might be interested in a bundle launching the same day that will include the game, a Yoshi amiibo, and an NFC reader/writer peripheral so you can still use your amiibo.