If you love hanging out with your friends on a weekend to play a lively board or card game, then please allow us to introduce you to the LEGO® Super Mario™ sets. Combining the best challenges, sounds, and characters of the nostalgic video games, these LEGO sets are like a board game but more fun, because you have the added benefit of working together to build the game before you engage in some good-natured competition.
There are endless (or, near enough) sets to collect, and they all connect together to build a bigger game. Think of the LEGO Super Mario universe as just that — a universe. The beauty about these sets is that they aren’t a one-and-done buy, but rather, they all build an interactive world, where the adventures become more impressive with every expansion set.
The best thing about board games and brick play is that it’s genuinely fun for the entire family. Much like playing video games, adults can sit around a table chatting the night away, while busying themselves with the nostalgia of playing with LEGO and Super Mario, and kids will enjoy all the fun interactive features of the bricks that bring the digital game into the real world.
Below, we’ve collated a concise list of some of our current favourite starter courses and expansion sets, so you can start collecting them all.
Adventures with Peach Starter Course
Though all the LEGO Super Mario sets fit together to form a bigger play world, the logical set to buy first is one of the starter courses. The Adventures with Peach Starter Course ($89.99) comes with the super cute (and interactive!) LEGO Peach figure, which shows emotion through an LCD screen and speaker. The set also comes with the Goal Pole, a cute swing, and three other figures (Lemmy, a Yellow Toad, and a Lava Bubble), not to mention that it’s compatible with all of the LEGO Super Mario expansion sets. For extra family fun, collect two starter course characters (like LEGO Mario, LEGO Luigi, or LEGO Peach), so you can connect them both to the course and team up for two-player games.
Adventures with Mario Starter Course
Like the course above, the Adventures with Mario Starter Course ($89.99) is a great place to start if you’re looking to build your LEGO Super Mario empire for maximum games night fun. This pack is one for lovers of the classic Super Mario games because it comes with 231 pieces, including an interactive Mario figure, plus action bricks that see Mario spring into the air and spin on a moveable plank, all while fighting the bad guys, Goomba and Bowser Junior. Personally, my nephews are already obsessed with anything related to Mario, but we adults also get a kick out of introducing them to our nostalgic favourite.
Peach’s Castle Expansion Set
The Peach’s Castle Expansion Set ($199.99) is one of our favourites in the LEGO Super Mario world, for a couple of reasons. This one comes with a whopping 1,216 bricks, which means you’ll be chipping away at this build for a decent amount of time with the family before you even get to the adventure part. You’ll be building the castle (complete with true-to-game elements like a Peach stained-glass window and Bob-omb painting), before moving your attention to five LEGO Super Mario Figures; Bowser, Ludwig, Toadette, a Goomba and a Bob-omb. Once you’ve felt the satisfaction of building the course, it’ll be onto the real adventure: playing through the course. To collect a LEGO Peach figure and get the most out of this set, you’ll need to grab any of the starter course sets — for example, the Adventures with Peach Starter Course ($89.99) — first, but if brick-building is your sole priority, you can hop straight to the castle.
Yoshi’s Gift House Expansion Set
Yoshi is, hands-down, one of the cutest characters in the Super Mario world, so the Yoshi’s Gift House Expansion Set ($49.99) is automatically one of our favourite sets. At an achievable 246 pieces, it comes with a spinning treat carousel, Yoshi’s bed, interactive fruits that the figures “eat” or gift to their friends, and a gift box. Like the castle above, you will need to pick up one of the starter courses before you can play the actual course, but the fun of these is, the more expansion sets to have, the more fun you’ll have collecting coins and fighting off the villains.
To explore the full LEGO Super Mario range, head to the LEGO website, now.
