Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Mickey Party

It's time for the second entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featrued Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we're taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin Gray.

Best Adaptation is probably the subtlest category in these jams: it's reserved for the game we think did the best or most interesting job of truly adapting" a newly public domain work by bringing its original spirit into the medium of games, rather than just being inspired by it or using material from it. Personally, I didn't really think about Steamboat Willie as a prime candidate for that kind of adaptation, but then along came Mickey Party - a tabletop party game unabashedly inspired by the famous Mario Party video games, and embodied with the spirit of the cartoon it's based on.

So what is the spirit of Steamboat Willie? I'd sum it up in one word: antics. Like other cartoons of the era, and like the works of Buster Keaton and other silent comedians that inspired them, the plot exists to take the characters from one amusing antic to the next, with each scene sporting its own comedic premise and jam-packed with action and visual interest. Mickey Party does the exact same thing: players roll dice to move along the board trying to collect enough notes" to earn a song", and enough songs to win, in the course of which they stumble into a series of fast-paced minigames for the whole group to play. Each minigame is directly based on one of the scenes from the cartoon: it's a series of animated antics, in game form.

And oh yeah: it's a lot of fun. Players will be making paper footballs, peeling oranges, stacking cups, and more. They'll be engaging in a few other layers of gameplay too, all equally centered on material from the cartoon, such as buying a variety of ludicrous items from the shop to gain different bonuses.

So there you have it: a cartoon, in game form. What more can I say? Pulling that off is more than enough for Mickey Party to earn the title of Best Adaptation.

Congratulations to Benjamin Gray for the win! You can download everything you need to play Mickey Party (minus the aforementioned dice, cups, and citrus fruits) from its page on Itch. plus don't forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut! We'll be back next week with another winner spotlight.