LEGO Party! hands-on preview — Not just another party game?

On the final day of Summer Game Fest, our crew was able to sit down with our friends with the new game, LEGO® Party!, which is set to release sometime this year. Looking at the surface, you can see similarities between LEGO® Party! and Mario Party. The name having party, the board format, the mini-games. However, we have to begin by saying board games have been around before Mario Party, and while they’re an iconic party game franchise, we have to give a chance to party games trying to do something different. So, while some things are par the course for party games, let’s discuss how LEGO® Party! stands out.

The competition was clear. Ron - Editor in Chief, David - Lead Editor, and myself (plus our friend from the LEGO® Party! team to make it four players) embarked on a quest to collect the most gold bricks as we entered the Pirate’s Lagoon. Fans of the old LEGO® racing game on the N64 will recognize the pirate lord from the cover of that older racing game. We went in and after I won the first mini-game, the rest of the mini-games were mostly won by Ron. However, that didn’t mean he was going to win. 

As we continued trying new spaces on the boards, building parts of the board with LEGO® pieces, and placing traps for each other; it was clear there’s a game within this game. You not only have to collect Golden Bricks and win the mini-games to get studs, you have to be ready to betray your fellow players on a dime, and plan out your route as best you can. 

LEGO® Party! allows you to choose specific areas of the map if you make it there first. For instance, I made it to a build section twice and chose a pirate ship the first time, which built a whole pirate ship for us to get on as well as a pirate’s hideout which gave us a whole area full of chairs and animals and places for pirates to hide. These also unlocked new spaces for us to land on including one space that, over the course of the gameplay, gave out FOUR golden bricks to players. Side note: Golden Bricks are much easier to obtain in our experience than other party games, so the number was about 2-3 Bricks higher than I expected. 

I mentioned earlier that you can betray your fellow players and this can happen in a few ways. On Pirate’s Lagoon, you can climb to the top of the volcano and make an explosion happen. When it does, a random player will lose a Golden Brick and it gets shot onto a different space of the map for someone to collect. There are also spaces where you can stop and purchase a trap to steal Golden Bricks. For this map, it was a giant crab ready to pinch. On top of that, you can also land on battle spaces that allow you to grab a Golden Brick. While that doesn’t count as stealing, if you’re trying to get someone to lose, it’s easy to help someone win so that they get the brick and not the person you’re trying to box out. 

Finally, you have to plan out your routes. I found that trying to get to all the new areas was the best way for me to collect Golden Bricks as I could just keep trying to land on new event spaces to see what happened. As you’ll be able to see in our video footage, this helped me greatly as I landed on a few big spaces that gave me bricks without paying studs. 

LEGO® Party! uses actual brick designs from LEGO itself. Meaning that you could actually build almost anything you see inside of the game. A feat I know fans of the LEGO franchise will start doing as soon as the game comes out. Knowing that you can go build that boat, or get that minifigure is one thing, but realizing that the animation team painstakingly built LEGO® Party! so we would be able to see things being built on the maps is something I can’t explain; it’s amazing to watch. Each brick comes down so fast yet just the way you’d probably see it in the instruction manual. Impressive stuff.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, on your turn, you’ll hit the A button (on XBOX) to select your number. While it is “random” it does feel like timing does work a bit more than other party games as I was able to get higher numbers by feeling out the timing. It will take much more testing to see just how random this truly is though. When you move, you can land on multiple types of spots from regular spots that provide LEGO studs to event spaces and more. The Golden Brick spot started in a great spot for us, but after we got that first brick it was teleported to the back of the map and none of us got there until the last turn when it was too late. This meant that every Golden Brick we got was found on event spaces or won in mini-games. With the amount of Golden Bricks available, this is an impressive amount of bricks for a party game. Made things feel chaotic and fun on a new level. 

The mini-games we played were pretty fun, although we needed some more practice at times. For time reasons, we really didn’t practice much and, for the most part, Ron kicked our butt at these. Who would’ve thought the man who’s played video games for 30+ years might be good at them! My favorite mini-games had to be the “snowboarding down a ski-slope” game where we raced to the bottom and tried to avoid the trees. Another was the mini-car racing in which you drive your car around the track as fast as you can without slamming into walls. During the car racing game, Ron and I actually tied, leading to the first tie that the team had with LEGO® Party! at Summer Game Fest! Pretty fun moment at the end, but we both got studs for winning. 

At the end, Golden Bricks win out with studs being the secondary objective. I ended up winning the game and got some Tim Tams from the LEGO® Party! team as a prize. Thankfully, no relationships ended due to this and everyone seemed to have a really fun time. LEGO® Party! has found a way to keep itself iconically LEGO even in a genre full of recognizable IP’s. I truly hope the rest of the game is as fun as the first board was for us. 

LEGO® Party! will be available in 2025 on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.