Official Review
I played Sweep the Board back at Tokyo Game Show last year, and it was actually one of my highlights from the show. Having now played the full game, those first impressions are more than reinforced. This is a very high quality, authentic Mario Party-like, complete with plenty of minigames and board dynamics. There are several boards that are based on key locations within the Demon Slayer universe, you get to choose between nine characters (sadly, not Nezuko), and then there are all kinds of items to buy and support characters to recruit (including Nezuko) to help you reach predetermined places objectives that move from place to place across the board as players reach them. Exactly like the star system in Mario Party.
One major difference between Mario Party and this one is that there is a day and night cycle. During the day, things are relatively mundane. Then one player will reach the objective, and night arrives. When that happens, Nezuko will pop out to give a boost to the player coming last (extra spaces of movement), and there will be a new goal to reach. The first person that does that triggers a spinner, which will either result in points, or a boss battle.
Those boss battles are essentially extended mini-games, where everyone works together to defeat one of the major opponents from the anime. This takes the form of a layered minigame, where you'll need to play basic rhythm games, tap the screen rapidly, and do quick-time events, with the person most effective at these (i.e. "fighting the boss") earning the most points. Then it becomes day again and a new objective appears somewhere on the board.
This day/night cycle isn't exactly revolutionary, but it does fit nicely with the Demon Slayer theme, and it also means that everyone will walk away from someone reaching the objective with something. Mario Party's great weakness, as a board game, has always been that those objectives are binary all-or-nothing rewards, and so with just a bit of luck, one person is going to frustrate everyone else by "magically" landing on every star along the way. With Sweep the Board, one player might still have all the luck with the dice rolls, but at least everyone else still feels like they're participating.
Meanwhile, random events and items ensure that there's a rare turn indeed where chaos doesn't play some kind of role to undermine whatever tactics people thought they'd bring to the game. Sweep the Board is perhaps less accessible than Mario Party for this reason. The first time you'll play there will be the perception that an almost overwhelming number of things are going on, while Mario Party has a few clearly marked features on each map and is generally more straightforward. Obviously, we're not talking about The Campaign For North Africa here, but Sweep the Board is a little more board game-y than Mario Party.
Generally speaking, the game hits the brief with the license. The characters all do a good job of representing their anime base, and while Nezuko isn't playable, she's present enough to be the best thing about this game, as she is the best thing about everything to do with Demon Slayer. Those boss battles help to make it clear that you're playing a Demon Slayer game too. It's just in the minigames where the focus is lost a bit. The developers demonstrate that they're good students of Mario Party – the variety isn't there but they've riffed on all the best Mario Party hits. It's just that a fair few of the minigames make no sense for the property. Yes, the bobsled with kart racing-like speed pads is one of the best Mario Party experiences. It isn't exactly Demon Slayer, though. Perhaps it is asking a bit much for a (relatively) quickly-produced tie-in to go the whole hog and try and fundamentally reinvent the Mario Party minigame, but because the developers haven't this game comes across as a bit like all those licensed Monopolies: For too much of the regular gameplay, it's the same basic game just with a different coat of paint.
With that being said if all the game developers out there want to start making Mario Party clones, I won't complain. There's something fundamentally appealing about a simple, well-made board game backed up with simple, well-made minigames. It goes almost without saying that Sweep the Board is better fun in multiplayer than single player, but if you can handle the suspiciously good rolls that the AI can get at times, it's also a great way to chill out at the end of a long week.
I am the target audience for Demon Slayer: Sweep The Board in that I'm both a Demon Slayer fan and the three Mario Party titles on the N64 Virtual Console on Switch are (by a significant margin) my most played titles on it. I got everything that I expected out of this game and had a lot of fun with it right throughout. In fact, with Mario Party itself in a weird kind of limbo of diminishing returns of late, perhaps we do need a new property to pick up the baton.
