Mario Party DS sold more than nine million units worldwide, which makes it the 11th-best-selling game on the DS. It was also the last Mario Party that Hudson Soft ever made, and DS players still pick it over every other board game on the system. They named it nearly twice as often as the runner-up, a cartridge with 42 games from around the world on it.
Below those two, the list gets stranger. One entry hides its card battles inside Aesop's fables, and another is a board game where the prize for saving the kingdom is the throne itself.
We surveyed DS players, going through 11,218 of their recommendations, and counted every board or card game they named, with a pick other players backed counting a little extra. A game only made the cut if the board or the deck is the game and it came out in English on the DS. Six games cleared the bar, which makes this a short list rather than a padded one.
6. Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's World Championship 2011: Over the Nexus (2011)
Over the Nexus was the official video game of the 2011 Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship, and it plays like a game that knows the tournament crowd is watching. It packs more than 4,200 cards, including the Storm of Ragnarok booster and the Lost Sanctuary structure deck, while its story mode borrows characters and situations from the 5D's TV series.
The screens got a rethink, too, with a new dual-screen layout that puts more information in front of you at a glance. Of all the yearly Yu-Gi-Oh! games on the DS, this is still the one players single out.
5. Dokapon Journey (2008)
Dokapon Journey is an RPG board game with a fairy tale setup. Monsters have invaded the Kingdom of Dokapon, so the King offers his crown and his daughter's hand in marriage to anyone who can save the land, and you race your friends, or the DS itself, to be that person. Nobody asks the princess.
It came out in Japan in 2008 as Dokapon Journey! Nakayoku Kenka Shite, and Atlus brought it to North America on April 14, 2009. It's the deepest cut on this list, but the players who know it still slip it into their lists of DS favourites.
4. Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Spirit Caller (2006)
Spirit Caller drops you into the Slifer Red dorm at Duel Academy at the start of a new school year, and strange things begin happening almost at once. Before long you hear the voice of a duel spirit, a good one, who helps you duel your way through the mystery. The story loosely follows the anime, with you standing in for Jaden in his duels.
Under the hood there are more than 1,500 cards, and you could duel anyone in the world over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Each boxed copy even came with three exclusive trading cards. Players still name it as a favourite, while admitting that it can get repetitive and never quite explains how to move the story along.
3. Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales (2006)
Chocobo Tales begins on a Chocobo farm, where a Black Mage named Croma brings home a magical tome that turns out to be alive. It is Darkmaster Bebuzzu, an evil book, and he traps most of the chocobos inside picture books scattered around the island. Those books hold the minigames, which borrow from Aesop's Fables and Grimms' Fairy Tales: The Adamantoise and the Cactuar is The Tortoise and the Hare with Final Fantasy creatures doing the racing.
The card game is the real draw, though. Pop-up Duels are turn-based card battles, fought on the top screen while the cards you play sit on the bottom one, and players describe the whole thing as a card game first, wrapped in minigames. Some critics found a few of those minigames far too hard for a children's game. The team followed it up with a DS sequel in 2008 that never left Japan.
2. Clubhouse Games (2006)
Clubhouse Games divides its 42 games into eight categories, from Old Maid and Spit at the easy end up to Contract Bridge and Shogi, and players in Europe know it as 42 All-Time Classics. Up to eight people can join through Single-Card and Multi-Card Download Play, and if a Rumble Pak is plugged in, the DS vibrates when it's your turn.
Online, strangers could only trade emoticons and stock messages like Good game! and Aaack!, while friends could draw out their own. Aaack! covers most of what anyone has ever felt during a game of Spit. That low-key feel is why players still recommend it as the easy pick for a short session, and in 2020 it got a Switch follow-up, Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics.
1. Mario Party DS (2007)
Mario Party DS opens with an invitation from Bowser, who is throwing a party to apologize for being such a jerk. It's a trap, naturally. He steals the Sky Crystal and uses a new device called the Minimizer to shrink everyone down to tiny size, and the whole game plays out on boards scaled up around them.
Up to four players roll dice around five game boards, and 73 minigames break up the turns, most of them built on what only a DS can do, from the microphone to the touchscreen. It had no online mode, but Download Play let up to four people play together using only one game card, which is a big part of why players still recommend it. They call it the best handheld Mario Party, and a few go further and call it the last good one. Even the South Korean release has a story: the country's ban on casino gambling in video games turned the Jackpot and Roulette minigames into UFO and Whac-A-Mole.
