By Alexander Gilbert
Is there a better way to spend your Saturday night than enjoying a night jam-packed with Mario-themed activities, making new friends, and trying your best to win a free Nintendo Switch?
On September 28, from 5 to 10 p.m., WARP Gaming’s Mario Party event will take over both the upstairs and downstairs of the Campus Center in a chaotic, entertaining, and interactive night of fun. The event will bring the hit video game series Mario Party to life, with life-sized minigames and game boards where students can compete against their friends and fellow students.
Caylen Hunt, the current president of WARP Gaming, created and ran the event for the first time last year and is again leading the event. Hunt is passionate about hosting the event. “I want people to have a reason to stay here on the weekends,” he said. “Let’s make this fun and interactive.”
The real-life Mario Party, run by students, will feature three life-sized board games where groups of four players can compete against each other for stars, power-ups, and raffle tickets. The boards, also known as maps, will be themed to various fan-favorite Mario characters such as Rosalina, Yoshi, and Bowser.
“The three maps are sponsored by different clubs,” Hunt explained. He noted that the Cupola yearbook is doing the Yoshi Isles map, the Gender & Sexuality Alliance (GSA) is handling the Rosalina’s Observatory Map, and the Campus Activities Board (CAB) is sponsoring the Bowser’s World map.
WARP Gaming will help group event attendees into groups of four to play against each other on one of the three random boards. This means you can either play with some of your friends or show up solo and be matched with and meet other students. During last year’s event, many new people got to socialize with each other after being grouped together and even continued playing with their group for a second game.
Hunt explained, “It was amazing to see how much people have fun and how it brings people together.” Throughout the event, it was common to hear people laughing and cheering because “what makes Mario Party so much fun is the chaos that happens. You find you love that chaos, and you love the interaction with each other while going against each other.”
In order to win Mario Party, you have to gain stars, which can be earned by beating your competitors in various minigames or by getting lucky with various twists and power-ups located throughout the board. Hunt recalled from last year’s event “how many times Bowser was summoned to cause chaos and steal people’s stars.”
At this year’s Mario Party event, the six minigames will be run by clubs and organizations across campus. These are the Westerner, Historical Society, Feminists Unite!, Improv On The Rocks, Gardening Club, and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Some of last year’s challenges included a cup stacking game, matching assorted bolts with their respective nuts, counting the number of Toads on the wall, and copying Shy Guy’s flag-waving movements in the recreation of the game Shy Guy Says.
When students are not actively upstairs playing on the Mario Party boards, there is still plenty of fun to be had downstairs in the Campus Center. Hunt explained that there will be “a couple of video game setups and an art zone where people can color.” There will also be music and plenty of free snacks for students. WARP Gaming plans to have chicken tenders, nachos, and cookie decorating available for students to enjoy at the event.
At the end of the event, various prizes will be raffled off to a handful of lucky students. The prize of the night will be a Nintendo Switch console, but there will be smaller prizes such as a blue shell plush, Nintendo neon sign, a mystery block, and three baskets themed to the icons of the maps: Rosalina, Yoshi, and Bowser. Each basket will have a variety of fun items such as a LEGO set, plushies, and stickers.
WARP Gaming’s Mario Party event recieved the Outstanding Program Award at the 2024 Distinguished Golden Bear Awards ceremony, organized by the Office of Student Involvement and Connections. Hunt explained that “there were a lot of emotions kicking in when WARP got the announcement that their event was winning the award.”
The Mario Party event will need new leadership after this year, however. “The event was just an idea I thought of over the summer” of 2023, he said, “and somehow it turned into a whole new tradition for WARP Gaming.” With Hunt graduating next spring, he is hoping future student leaders will continue the tradition and ensure that Mario Party remains a memorable and engaging campus program at Western New England University for years to come.
