Super Mario: Level Up! board game review

“It’s a me, Mario!”

I wish we could play the catchy Super Mario music to go along with that phrase for you, but you’ll just have to imagine it yourself. That is, if you’re a Mario fan.

And even if you’re not, there’s a good chance your kids are Mario fans.

Mario is one of the most recognizable characters in the world!

So it’s not surprising to find board games with a Mario theme.

Today we’re taking a look at Super Mario: Level Up! the board game.

How to play Super Mario: Level Up!

Super Mario: Level Up is a super simple game to play.

The object of the game is to score the most points over 3 rounds of play. Players earn points based on the position of the characters on their Line Up card at the end of each round.

Before play can begin, players need to construct the game board with its 7 different levels.

Each player draws a Line Up card which shows the 6 characters they’ll score that round (they’ll keep this info secret). They also get a set of voting cards: 1 “Yes” card and a number of “No” cards depending on the number of players (eg. in a 4-player game, each player gets 3).

The Power Up cards are shuffled and placed in a draw deck. The Block tokens are also placed face down and scrambled around.

Then players are ready to play!

Each round begins with a Placement phase. In turn order, players choose one character and place them on a Level of their choice (on Levels 1, 2, 3, or 4). This continues until all the players have placed the correct number of characters depending on total number of players.

There are 13 characters in the game and any characters not placed by the players are then placed on Level 0.

The only restriction in placement is that there can’t be more than 4 characters on a level at a time.

After the initial placement, any empty spaces on levels 1-5 are filled in by random Blocks.

Then the game moves to the Movement phase.

In turn order, players choose a character and move it up one level. If a character moves up to a level where there’s a Block token, the player reveals the token and will be able to take that action. Some Blocks must be used immediately, and others may be kept to play later. Some Blocks also let players draw a Power Up card which they keep secret until they want to use it.

Players can only move a character down a level if they have a Block that allows them to.

When a character is moved from level 5 to level 10, there’s a vote to determine if this character will be named champion.

To vote, all players secretly choose one of their vote cards to play. Once all have made their choice, they simultaneously reveal their vote. If all votes are “Yes”, that character is named champion and the round ends. If there’s even 1 “No” vote, that character is removed from the board and the round continues.

After any vote, the “Yes” vote cards are taken back in hand while all “No” vote cards are discarded.

Play for the round continues until one character is successfully voted champion.

At the end of the round players reveal their Line Up cards and score points equal to the level of each character on their card. If a character was eliminated from the game due to “No” votes, they’ll score 0 points that round.

To begin a new round, players draw a new Line Up card and get all their voting cards back in hand. All remaining Block tokens on the board are removed and scrambled back with those left on the table. The characters are also placed back on the table. The Placement phase begins with the new starting player (the player to the left of the one who elected the last champion).

The game ends after the end of the 3^rd round and all players tally their final score. The player with the most points is the winner.

Can the whole family enjoy Super Mario: Level Up?

It may be obvious that Super Mario: Level Up was made specifically for families with young kids to play together. Both the theme and simple game play are attractive for a young audience.

Most kids will be very familiar with all the Super Mario characters and will enjoy playing with them in a board game.

One kid-friendly factor in the game is that players aren’t just one character. Instead, they’ll have 6 total characters they’re hoping to score points for. So even if one of their characters is eliminated from the game, the player isn’t out. They’ll still have 5 other characters in play.

Even though the game includes both Mario character heroes and villains, there aren’t any ‘bad’ characters in the game. Every character in the game is equal. So whether you have Bowser or Luigi on your card, you’ll want them to do well. It’s not like you want the bad characters to lose and the heroes to win. You just want everyone on your card to score well.

We also like the addition of the Blocks and Power Up cards. The main reason we like these is that they throw twists in the game. They may let players move characters down a level, swap characters on the board, take an extra turn, or even cancel another player’s “No” vote.

It’s a cute game with fun guessing about what other players are trying to do and how they’re going to vote.

And you can be as cutthroat as you’d like…

I’ll just say when playing with teenagers, there will be a lot of characters eliminated during play. 🙂

Some rounds we’ve had half the characters voted off the top level before a champion is finally crowned. The good news is that it’s always accompanied by a lot of laughs.

That being said, there are a couple things we’re concerned about for the intended younger audience.

The dimensional game board, while very cool to look at and play on can be troublesome to put together every time you want to play. After only a few times of putting the board together we’ve noticed a few of the side cardboard notches getting frayed. When this happens, it gets trickier to place the levels appropriately. And we can see this being a problem for kids who want to play the game frequently by themselves.

The other issue may be if younger kids will get their feelings hurt along the way. As mentioned, just because one of their characters is eliminated during voting and they’ll have others to score points from, they still may feel hurt if it was dad who voted “No” to take them out.

How does Super Mario: Level Up score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Since it’s such a quick game, it’s easy to dive into another game immediately after one ends. And if you dive into subsequent games in a row you won’t have to worry about setting up the game board again and again.

The other thing we’ve found in playing back-to-back games is that meta-game posturing comes into play. Meaning that the results of one game impact how players play subsequent games. We’ve found the following games to have more eliminated characters than the first game.

That being said, Super Mario: Level Up isn’t likely to stay in our family board game closet mainly because of the age of our kids. It’s been fun to play, but teenagers are going to leave Super Mario: Level Up on the shelf when choosing games to play. (But they’ll still pull out our Super Mario Chess game to play – those are just super cool chess pieces.)

If you’ve got younger kids in your family though who enjoy Mario, then you may want to grab a copy of Super Mario: Level Up.