Life can be stressful, particularly if you’re a video game character. Going off on long adventures to save princesses, bashing your head on blocks, jumping on foes, falling down drainpipes and changing costumes along the way. All this running and jumping malarkey can takes its toll. Sure you can take your kart out for a spin, feel the wind whoosh through your moustache, but how do you get to truly rewind? Throw a party of course!

Mario threw his first shindig in 1998 for the Nintendo 64, and has had regular soirees ever since. This is his first for the portable Switch however, so is it Mario’s best party yet?

If you’ve never been invited to one of Mario’s gatherings before, it’s essentially a collection of mini-games that can be played in multi-player. It has over 80 of them to play, which isn’t a bad number, and reduces the risk of repetition, unless you play until your arms fall off.

The heart of the experience revolves around a board game, where each player rolls dice and moves around a virtual board, where, as well as landing on mini-games to play, there are pitfalls to avoid, like moving back places. The winner, as you would expect, is the one who reaches the end first.

As you enter a mini-game, you’re usually met with a trial mode, so you can find your feet. Some might prefer the ability to turn this option off, and just experience the game immediately, without a practice, as after a go or two, some are surely to be more competent at it than others.

Then you have the mini-games themselves. They are a delightful collection of quirky events that take up to 30 seconds in length. Some of them include sizzling a piece of steak in a pan, racing on a trike, cleaning windows, racing on top of a barrel, to avoiding being knocked down by US football players.

Obviously the more playing, the more fun there’s to be had. But even if you’re on your own, like so many of us are in life, you can still play against the CPU, but really, that sucks all the fun out of it.

The game has a great balance time wise too. The board games can take anything between an hour or two, which is a substantial amount of time. But as long as you can stand being in the same room as everyone, then all is good. If you want to dip in for shorter periods however, you can. There are various ways of doing it, including a mini-marathon, to simply picking your favourites.

You can also play complete strangers, if you so wish, but just remember you have to now sign up to Nintendo’s new Switch Online service, but that's for all online gaming now, not just this title.

The experience as a whole is a uniquely silly one. You would have to have a heart of stone to walk away without a stupid grin on your face after playing.

If we could add one thing to it, it would be this: a Wario Ware section, or preferably, a Switch version of the game itself. Although the games are cute, they could just go up a gear in terms of weirdness, which is so evident in the portable Wario mini games.

The adage is clearly correct though, there really ain't no party like a Super Mario Party.