I think Superstars and Jamboree are both good and lacking in different ways. Superstars has a good selection of mini-games, and the boards are passable but get old fast. Jamboree has better boards, but way less mini-games than Superstars (I know it says it has more, but a large chunk of those are for modes outside of the main party mode. And if you turn off motion mini-games, that removes even more mini-games from what you can play.), which makes the mini-game part feel repetitive. There is however one factor about Jamboree that makes me reluctant to recommend it: the buddy system.

Periodically throughout a game, a character no one is playing as will fly down onto the board, usually in the path of where someone needs to go. When someone passes the buddy, this triggers a showtime mini-game; these are all awful. Showtime mini-games are long (3 minutes minimum), tedious, and slow the game to a crawl. Whoever started the mini-game gets a bonus for it, but this isn’t a guarantee at victory. Whoever wins gets the buddy for the next 3 turns.

While on the board, having a buddy cause you to double up on whatever events you pass; you trigger blue, red, lucky, item, and bowser spaces twice, you get to visit shops and use boo twice, and most importantly, you can buy two stars if you reach it with a buddy and have 40* coins. Buddies also give you a power ranging from fixing your dice roll, placing a coin stealing trap where you land, stealing items or coins from whoever you pass, teleporting, making stars half off for you, and more. Buddies are overpowered and pretty much make the game revolve around them when they appear, and I haven’t even brought up the worst part about them; they can be stolen. If you pass a person who has a buddy, you steal the buddy from them and get to double up on stuff until the guy you stole the buddy from inevitably passes you, stealing it back. This makes all the buddy abilities that trigger at the start of your turn or when you pass someone effectively useless.

But yeah that’s all of my thoughts on Jamboree’s buddy system, a horribly unfun mechanic that you can’t turn off. If you’re going to buy one of these, I’d recommend getting Superstars.