Month of Mario: Mario’s Game Gallery (PC)

Mario’s Game Gallery, rereleased under the name Mario’s FUNdamentals in 1998, is primarily a collection of card, board, and dice games. There are five games to play, Checkers, Backgammon, Dominoes, Go Fish, and Yacht, which is Yahtzee but without the license from Milton Bradley for the name. It is a pretty solid selection, none of these games so common someone would likely own a version for their home computer already but not so obscure that there’s no appeal to picking it up. However, as the name might suggest, this game isn’t so much about the games, but who you’re playing them with. You cannot play Mario’s Game Gallery against another human player, the experience all about playing the five games with Mario himself.

Voiced by Charles Martinet, Mario being your opponent is a heavily emphasized part of this experience, and he’s given quite a lot of dialogue so it doesn’t just feel like you’re up against a generic computer controlled opponent. Mario will narrate most every move in every game, not always in detail, but he remains a constant vocal presence throughout. This does make Go Fish a particularly excellent selection for this collection, the game inherently involving frequent speech and a range of subjects thanks to its Mario-themed card deck. There are some oddities like him calling the mushroom-headed character Toad “Little Toadies” when asking for their card and Bowser is mispelled as Bowzer in the subtitles, but Mario’s voice lines can provide some memorable color to the experience even if they will likely grow quite repetitive. Most of the time playing through a game once will already show you most of his unique lines, save for those that arise from taking too long to play. Mario trying to fill dead silence with some corny knock knock jokes is rather charming though, certainly a better approach then the game trying to sprinkle in abundant praise for the player’s moves which can sting when you know it was a bad move or feel inauthentic because it’s only the first move of a game like Checkers where your first actions are often not that crucial.

Each of the games on offer is themed around Mario’s world in some way, Checkers electing to replace red and black pieces with Yoshis and Koopas instead. The battle between baby dinosaurs and turtles to clear the other team entirely from the board by leaping over them mostly just means they each have a special animation for taking each other out, but when you king a piece by reaching the other side of the board, you’ll see Yoshis grow into adults or Koopas upgrade into their king Bowser. Bowser is unfortunately rather badly animated, his movements across the checkerboard more like nervous shuffles as if he was balancing something atop his head that he’s trying to keep stable. Checkers is executed well enough otherwise though. The player can choose whether or not players are forced to take jumps when they’re available, and since both ways of playing have their strategic value, it’s a better offering than forcing someone into one game type. Mario is a fairly capable Checkers player as well; he will sometimes sacrifice a piece pointlessly, but mostly he seems quite watchful of the board, especially at the start. Of the five games on offer, Checkers might be where Mario feels closest to human in how he plays, not perfect, but aware enough to make sure players of any age can likely get a few good games out of him.

Go Fish may be where Mario is at his most vocal, but it is also one area where the game’s visuals surely come up short. It’s not played any differently from the usual card game, the goal being to make “books” which are formed when you have four of a card type. To get cards, you ask your opponent if they have any of the kind you’re holding, and they either hand you the ones they own or tell you to “go fish” and draw a card from the deck. Funnily enough, this is the only mode where you have a voice, a child’s voice telling Mario to go fish if he makes a wrong guess but otherwise staying silent throughout the rest of the game gallery. The cards themselves have an interesting range of characters on them, some expected like Goombas, Koopas, and the Princess, while other picks like the Rip Van Fish and Rex feeling like unique but fun choices. However, when you look at Mario himself or the deck, you’ll notice something’s not adding up. Mario can have no cards in his hand or 20, and yet when you look at him, he’s always holding four. Mario is lightly animated in all five game modes, and while it’s understandable they maybe didn’t want him to hold a full fan’s worth of cards, it does feel strange when he’s holding more cards than he owns. The deck is also always the same size, whether it’s one card left or still packed. Some information boxes at least give you the true information so you don’t have to guess about such things, and as a result, Go Fish feels like more effort could be put into presentation, but otherwise it works just fine. It’s hard to say how good Mario is at Go Fish, there are strategic considerations behind actions like asking for the same card repeatedly that might seem unintelligent if you don’t think more deeply about them, but he seems to be a competent player here as well.

Dominoes is perhaps the least interesting of the games on offer mostly because Mario doesn’t have too much interesting to say and the visuals are a bit less exciting. The dominoes have images of power-ups from the Mario games and must be linked together by matching them to pieces that are on the end of the current arrangement on the table. You draw from the bone pile if you have no available matches, and the game ends either when no more pieces can be played or one player places all their dominoes. Mario will tally up a score for tiebreakers so there’s always a winner, but he’s unfortunately cramped into a small box in the upper left corner due to the screen space a game of dominoes needs. There’s not much life to this game and limited room for thinking about your moves, meaning a more interesting game should have been chosen that better suits the Nintendo theming, but it’s not harmful because it is a straightforward adaptation of the tile game otherwise.

Yacht is Yahtzee in all but name, the player able to roll a set of five dice up to three times to try and get specific arrangements of numbers to add to a score card. You can choose which dice to set aside and which to roll for each round of three, the game going until both players have filled their score cards even if it means crossing out spots they didn’t meet the conditions for. Mario might go for some long shot categories, pretty confident in his ability to get Straights for example, or sometimes pursue a four or five of a kind with a low value number like 1, but this keeps him on an even enough level with the potentially young audience for this title and die roll luck doesn’t seem skewed so games can remain competitive enough. It should be noted that there’s no way to speed up Mario’s turns save for disabling sound, Mario’s voice disappearing should you do so even though subtitles do still announce his actions. Mario’s voice is sort of the big reason to play this over standard adaptations of these games though and he’s not that annoying save perhaps saying “Here, fishy-fishy!” quite often over in Go Fish. Notably, Mario’s difficulty can’t be adjusted, but it hasn’t really been much of an issue thus far.

Backgammon is where Mario’s Game Gallery gets a little sloppy though. First of all, of the five games on offer, its rules might be the least familiar to the average player. Despite this, the in-game rules explanation every game has is not only weakest for Backgammon, it barely even tries to explain the game. It is not a game that can be easily learned from just watching, it has fringe case rules of vital importance, and Mario makes no effort to explain his actions here. Backgammon is notable though as the only game in the collection that lets you disable animations. It also uses Yoshis and Koopas for the two sides of play, but they move so slowly across the board that they aren’t worth seeing in action. Lastly, even if you do know the rules of Backgammon, you will need to know them well enough to guess the important home spaces based on how pieces are placed on the board at the start since Mario’s Game Gallery does not specify where those places are otherwise.

A brief primer for those unfamiliar with Backgammon, but the 24 triangles are basically board game spaces, your goal being to move your pieces across them to reach six spaces that are designated as your “home spaces”. Once all your checkers are spread across the six home spaces, you then roll to get them off the board, a player winning once they have no pieces remaining. Every turn you roll two dice to determine how much you can move, the player able to move one piece twice or split the die across two pieces. Doubles will let you move four times instead. The only other major consideration of note is that you cannot place pieces on a space where the opponent has pieces, meaning you can try to deliberately block spots to try and slow down the opponent. However, if there’s only one piece on a spot, you can land on it and send it to the bar, where the player has to roll on their turn until they get a roll that sends it back into the game. A piece in the bar needs to reenter by way of the opponent’s home area, where again they can try to block you by crowding spaces and keeping you trapped in the bar. It does feel important to explain the rules and strategy here, because Mario seems to make some pretty bad choices when he rolls. He’s not afraid to attack your solo pieces, in fact, he’s pretty aggressive in that way, but he plays almost no defense. When he rolls, he might elect to move pieces already in his home area closer to the edge of the board instead of working to get more checkers home. This almost guarantees he will have to roll the dice more to win, and it also frees up more places for you to reenter the board should he knock a piece of yours to the bar. There are times you might not want to isolate a piece with a roll and do similar shuffling, but he’ll ignore safe tactics elsewhere for this odd shuffling that makes him a bit of a weak opponent. He’s no pushover, and some leeway so kids would be able to beat him on occasion isn’t bad, but at times you almost wonder if he knows the rules to Backgammon himself.

THE VERDICT: He’s not too good at Backgammon and a bit of a chatterbox, but Mario is a pretty suitable partner for all five games in Mario’s Game Gallery. A decent computer-controlled opponent with an upbeat personality and some fun peculiarities, he doesn’t exactly elevate the games per se, but it is more interesting than playing the games against a silent faceless opponent. Some more options would be appreciated and dominoes feels like a weak choice when other games could better let Mario express himself, but this pack of amusements does its job and could work well enough as your go-to versions of its games when you have no humans to play against.

And so, I give Mario’s Game Gallery for PC…

An OKAY rating. Perhaps Mario’s Game Gallery was reaching a bit too far beyond its normal scope with Backgammon, maybe Mancala would have been a better fit and one it could adequately explain in its rules. Dominoes could probably be replaced with a better parlor game as well, one that gives Mario more material to work with, but mostly this collection is inoffensive and has a few little charming spots to make it better than if Mario wasn’t present at all. Most of the game works well enough without being too hard or easy, although being able to set your difficulty feels like the next step the game should take before any others. Already Mario is so chipper and supportive it feels like he almost wants you to beat him, but really young players might not outmatch his decent Checkers play until they better understand the board game. At the same time, having a partner who plays pretty well can also make them start trying to figure out the game. Competent is likely the best way to describe the game as a whole, often including a smart option or two like removing Backgammon animations or letting you pick if jumps are forced in Checkers, but there’s room to grow in most respects as well. It didn’t need to get too granular with oddball rules, but there are other collections of board, card, and dice games out there that offer more despite not bearing the Nintendo theming.

Mario’s Game Gallery is a pretty inoffensive part of Mario’s curious history of being licensed out to other companies. While it is sometimes called an educational game, there’s nothing educational about it compared to a standard collection of tabletop amusements. Mario being nice to a presumably young player doesn’t put this in the same boat as games like Mario Teaches Typing or members of the Mario’s Early Years series. It is nice the game didn’t just slap the faces of Mario characters on cards and call it a day though, giving your opponent a voice a unique touch even if Mario would benefit from a wider pool of things to talk about. A bit more personality and range could make him a standout part instead of a nice little feature, but it at least makes playing Mario’s Game Gallery feel different than the wide range of straightforward parlor game packages you can find for the PC.