Family video games with two people are fun. With four people? Sometimes chaotic. With a hundred people? Who the heck knows. Nintendo’s Everybody 1-2 Switch, available Friday, is going for the extreme end of the massively multiplayer local spectrum with a game that could be played with a hundred people at once in the same room. All you need is a single TV-dockable Nintendo Switch… and a bunch of controllers or phones.
My mind jumps to weddings or bar/bat mitzvahs or cruise ships. Nintendo’s game leans on the magic of crowds to build on some new fun ideas. Also, this is the long-awaited sequel (for me) to Nintendo’s weirdest launch game for the Switch back in 2017, 1-2 Switch.
Read more: Best Multiplayer Switch Family Games
I wasn’t sure about 1-2 Switch back then: the two-player game sometimes felt like it didn’t have enough ideas, but the whimsical minigames it did have (like a race to shave your face, eat imaginary hot dogs or milk a cow) were wild. It’s grown into a family cult favorite around my house.
Everybody 1-2 Switch pushes the envelope a lot further by adding compatibility with phones. The Switch supports up to eight Joy-Cons connected, but beyond that Nintendo is authorizing “smart devices,” which could be phones or tablets, to connect via QR code and become touch-enabled game controllers, too.
In a play session ahead of the game’s release, my CNET colleague Bridget Carey and I got into some of the weird games and had some fun.
Some of the game’s offerings are Joy-Con-only; some can be played with Joy-Cons or phones; and some, surprisingly, are phone-only. We tried a game where you had to pump the controllers up and down to try to inflate a balloon, but not have it pop (I won). Another game absurdly had us hip-bumping to knock another person’s bunny character off the screen, holding the Joy-Cons behind our backs (I lost).
Me trying to bump my hips in one of the games.
Another clever and challenging phone-based game asked us all to run around the room, trying to photograph a certain shade of color and see how accurately our picture could match. We also played a quiz game where around 20 of us had to quickly answer simple two-answer, multiple-choice questions on our phones by tapping as fast as we could. The leaderboards showed how close or far we got. One fun twist: The quizzes can be customized, so we answered questions about the room we were in (and Nintendo trivia), but you could make your own special home version or something for a party.
There’s an element of pure randomness here: Depending on your phone, the color might look different on your display, and the camera might capture colors differently. There’s also questions of ping: So many phones and controllers on the same Wi-Fi network is bound to result in some people drawing a short straw. Jackbox Games offerings are more forgiving, allowing a time delay to fairly register answers or drawings. But the chaos of the group games still seemed fun in my short play test (about an hour, with breaks).
Phone screens can turn into interactive games in Everybody 1-2 Switch, like this quiz game we played.
One change I also saw in the way we played Everybody 1-2 Switch is how it’s designed for docked TV play. The first 1-2 Switch was something different, where lots of games actually encouraged eye contact with players without looking at the Switch screen. Large party games make sense in front of a big TV. And I have no idea what sorts of mad experiences 100-player games will result in. That’s Everybody 1-2 Switch’s biggest unique advantage — no other Switch game even comes close to that level of simultaneous local play.
The game’s price is also a big draw. At $30 (£25, AU$50), it’s one of the least expensive first-party Nintendo games around. I don’t know how much fun extended sessions will be, or whether any of it’s ultimately better than what Mario Party, or Jackbox Party Pack games, offers. But, if you’re planning a big summer party and want to have some fun on the Switch, this definitely looks like the game to buy. At around the cost of a board game, it’s not too much of an investment, either.
It’s also a great reminder that large-scale phone-based local party games should and could be more of a widespread thing than they are right now.