Review a Bad Game Day: Fortune Street

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When you look at the cover of Fortune Street, you’re immediately reminded of Mario Party. A prolific series, Mario Party saw only two releases on the Wii, and fans of the series kept clamoring for more. I thought Fortune Street might make a good substitute. When I first saw Fortune Street on a store shelf, I thought that it looked interesting. Nobody in the local game shop knew much about it, though. I went home and looked up a little more information about it, and found Amazon selling it a ridiculously low price, I had to at least try it. Little did I know it would become my first entry in Review a Bad Game Day.

Featuring characters crossing over from the Dragon Warrior universe and the Nintendo universe, players participate in a board game, rolling a die and having the option to buy up property. You can try to bid on properties that are already owned, or forcefully overtake them by paying much more than their current value. You might do this because properties in a series are worth more when you own them all. You also travel around the board collecting suits (like cards: Ace, Heart, Spade, Club) and use them to ‘power up’ your property the next time you land on one (much like buying houses or hotels in Monopoly).

And that’s that. There are more complex rules one can play by, some sort of stock market simulator is involved… I left the game at a friend’s house and he played it more than I did, but literally only out of sheer boredom.

Evidently the Fortune Street series has had a long run in Japan, but they must have known American Audiences might react this way to it, as it did not see a release in the United States until it appeared here on the Nintendo Wii, featuring cross-over characters like Mario and Donkey Kong. Unfortunately, the gameplay makes me feel like a pompous business man, not a hyper-active Italian plumber in a fictional land of wonder and amazement.

Fortune Street plays like Mario Party meets Monopoly but with gameplay designed by actual bankers.& realtors. Frankly, if you want Mario Party, get Mario Party, if you want Monopoly, get Monopoly.