May the Best Snowman Win

May the Best Snowman Win is a homebrew minigame for the Nintendo 64 by Razz released fon 13 Dec 2024. It’s a winter competition where four players traverse a maze to collect all the differet parts needed to build a snowman.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About May the Best Snowman Win

The game takes place in a snowy hedge maze with a Christmas tree in the centre. You play as one of four winter adventurers walking through it and collecting items to build up a snowman.

These are the items you need to collect and bring back to the top of the screen:

• Three snowballs
• Carrot nose
• Stick arms
• Scarf
• Top hat
• Gloves
• Coal eyes & buttons

Once someone brings all the items up to their snowman or the time runs out, the game ends. The player with the most complete snowman wins.

Players can attack each other to steal the item that their opponent is carrying. What would be a quite simple game that plays the same each time becomes a lot more interesting due to the inter-player combat that ensures that no two playthroughs are ever the same in this collectathon.

There is some strategy involved in that it’s much more expensive (time-wise) to gather all the items on your own, but stealing an item you already have is also a waste of time. This means that you can ‘counter’ an attacker by going for items they already have.

There is also a limit to the amount of an item that can be collected at once to prevent all players going for the same item, but I never found it to cause much headache.

Credits

May the Best Snowman Win was made by Razz as a one-person entry into the game jam.

Review and conclusion

On first impressions, this game does things pretty well. It has a helpful instruction screen that isn’t too annoying, and the gameplay is simple and clear. The only thing I found confusing on my first couple of rounds was the amount of each item to get since you need three snowballs but only one of the rest, and I wasn’t sure whether the ball needed to be rolled up or not.

Regarding the AI, it does manage to play competently in the sense that they can build the snowmen in a fairly good amount of time. Razz did mention in the interview that he didn’t implement any attacking mechanism due to time constraints, but I think that the pathfinding is good enough that it gives the CPU players a decent chance at success. Though I don’t feel that there was much of a difference between the different difficulty levels.

I think that May the Best Snowman Win is a great entry into the game jam library. It’s just the right length for a minigame compilation, and definitely has that ‘Mario Party’ feel to it. I do look forward to what Razz has to offer in the future of N64 homebrew as this is one of the best games in the game jam that were made by a single person.