💨Zoomies!

Controls

The stick and button 1 play the whole game: nothing in a room ever needs button 2, which is for finding your pet in a crowd. With two or more players, ▲▼ on the pre-game card picks Party Run or Race.

How a round goes

A round is one room of the house: two parts, the room's boss, the Treat Slide and a card that adds it all up. Mister Tidy, the house's grumpy robot vacuum, has sucked up the birthday cake and every candle and rolled off to tidy them away, and four pets have caught the zoomies. A seat is always the same pet — Churro the dachshund at station 1, Domino the cat at 2, Clover the bunny at 3, Popcorn the guinea pig at 4 — wearing the seat's colour as a sweater, bow tie, scarf or cape. All four share one body and one set of moves, so no seat is a handicap. Alone, Robo, a wind-up tin pup, trots beside you: he bops gadgets and sets off beds and sprinklers, never picks anything up and cannot be hurt.

Before the room comes the house map, a doll's house cut open with the party's cake in the middle. Every pet has a paw in its colour: the stick moves it from room to room and button 1 stamps your vote. When everyone has stamped, or after eight seconds, the room with the most paws is played; a tie goes to the glowing room, the first one the party has not cleared. Random Mode, and a table that has wandered off, just play the glowing room. Three doors are open so far — Backyard Bash, Sofa Summit and Kitchen Chaos — and a paw on any other door sends everybody to the Backyard again, with a note on the card. The first round of a party opens with a seven-second cartoon of Mister Tidy hoovering up the cake; button 1 skips it after three seconds.

In a part you run on with one camera that follows the pack and favours whoever is in front. The stick runs and button 1 jumps — tap for a hop, hold for a high one. Pull down while running to curl into a cannonball, which gains speed on every hill and pops what it hits; stand still, hold down and tap button 1 to wind up a zoom, then let go of down to shoot off. The Tidy Squad are Mister Tidy's cleaning gadgets — brushes, spray bottles, feather dusters, mops — each with the same grumpy eyebrows. Land on one, or roll into it, and it bursts into confetti and sweets; touch one any other way and it is a bump. Pop several without landing in between and the points climb. A sponge is the exception: it cannot be popped, and bounces you high instead. Land on a friend's head and you spring off it; pets never push each other.

Each room has its own tricks. Backyard Bash has sprinklers that throw up a column of water on a steady beat — stand in it and it lifts you to the high route under the pergola — and leaf piles that burst into sweets when you run or roll through them. Sofa Summit has cushions that bounce you (hold button 1 to go higher), a wind-up toy train to ride under a run of gadgets, and a bookshelf you climb shelf by shelf. Kitchen Chaos has toasters that pop you up a moment after you step in, conveyor counters that carry you with or against your run, and oranges rolling down the slopes — bounce on one for height, or let it pass. In every part the way splits into a low route and a high one up a boing bed, and both reach the end.

Sweets are your health, and the counter on the TV calls them treats. They lie in lines and arcs along the way. A bump scatters yours in a fan in your colour, up to sixteen of them; only you can grab them back, from half a second after the bump for about four seconds. With none left you are dizzy for a second, and that is all. There are no lives and no game over: nobody is ever out. A Little Kids seat loses at most five sweets in a bump and is never dizzied.

Nobody waits for anybody. A pet the camera cannot keep on screen for about a second, one that falls into a pit, and one stuck for six seconds while the pack runs on all get the same rescue: a Fetch disc in the pet's colour whooshes in, the pet snaps it up, and it sails back to just behind the front-runner, where the pet hops off — by itself, or early with button 1. A kid who has not touched anything for ten seconds is walked along by the autopilot, their pet sleepwalking with eyes shut and a 'z z' over its head, and the next press hands it straight back.

The same disc brings a new kid in: in Party Run, press START at the next empty station and that pet arrives from the top of the screen over the front-runner, with no sweets and no points, blinking for three seconds. That works during a part until the first pet is through the arch, and during a boss fight, but not on the Treat Slide; when a second kid arrives, Robo waves and flies off.

Each part has two checkposts, where the first pet past raises a pennant in its colour, and ends at the Party Arch. The first pet through snaps the ribbon and the others have about eight seconds to follow before the discs carry them across; if a part drags past four minutes, the discs carry everybody. The part card then grades the team S, A or B on its time, the sweets it kept and whether anybody got bumped, and no table gets less than a B.

Along the way are gift boxes: jump into one from below or land on it and it opens — ten sweets, a floatie ring that soaks up one bump, a treat magnet, Super Zoomies (ten seconds of extra speed in which every gadget you touch pops), or a party popper that bursts every gadget on the screen. And every room hides six candles, three to a part: one at the end of the high route, one inside a stack of cardboard boxes that only a roll or a zoom will break (three bounces on top do it on a Little Kids seat), and one in a doll's-house nook you enter by its pet flap at ground level and leave through a window. A candle belongs to the whole table.

After Part 2 the gates shut and Mister Tidy himself rolls in with the room's attachment clipped on. Rolling into him only bounces you off; his weak spot is the big orange OFF button on his lid. When it glows, bounce on it and he powers down for a moment and loses a battery cell. The battery is six cells for one kid and two more for every extra player, so a bigger table has more to knock out. Every attack winds up for at least a second, and from half battery he is faster and adds a twist. A touch at the wrong time is a bump, like any other.

The Leaf Blower stops to blow a gust that pushes everybody back, then coughs, overheated, with the button glowing; in the second half he lobs leaves and inhales, pulling pets toward his nozzle. The Duster Twirl sweeps two duster arms out along the floor (jump) or at head height (stay low or roll under), then goes dizzy; later he rises off the screen and drops on a shadow that warns you first. The Whisk Mixer climbs onto a stand and whisks up a vortex that pulls pets in and eats loose sweets; the dough he flings lands as bouncy pads, and a pad springs a pet up to his button. When the last cell goes he spins, coughs up the room's cake tier in a fountain of confetti and sweets that anyone can grab, and trundles off.

Beat the boss and the room ends on the Treat Slide: thirty seconds down a long hill of sweets, with everyone carried along on their belly. Button 1 hops to grab the arcs of sweets, and that is the whole game; nothing hurts, and the sweets here are points, not health. Three balloon gates cross the slope, each with a team quota of sweets grabbed since the last one — twelve, plus six for every extra kid — and the bow is bronze for one gate made, silver for two, gold for three. Then the world card shows the cake tier you won, the candles found out of six, the bow and the MVP.

Find all six candles in a room and every pet on the table puts on that room's hat — the straw sun hat, the paper crown, the chef's toque — which button 2 on the map can swap for any other the party has earned. For the rest of the party the map remembers the rooms cleared, the candles found and the hats, and different tables' candles add up.

Race is the other mode. With two or more players, ▲▼ on the pre-game card swaps Party Run for Race. The track is a room's Part 1, start to finish, with its gadgets and gift boxes but no candles. The Backyard track is always open; the others open once the party has cleared their room, and the paws on the map pick one. First through the Party Arch wins and starts a fifteen-second clock; whoever is still running when it ends is placed by how far they got. Sweets still scatter in a bump, and being dizzy costs a second, which in a race is the real cost. The disc is fair here, not free: it costs three sweets and sets you down at the back of the view instead of beside the leader. Nobody can drop in to a race.

Scoring and winning

Party Run is co-op: the table wins together, and there is no way to lose. Points are personal and decide only the MVP — the top scorer, or every top scorer on a tie. A sweet is worth 10 and a gadget 100, climbing to 200, 500 and 1,000 for each pop in a row without landing; a checkpost is 100, a gift box 50, a candle 500, a boss's battery cell 300 to whoever bounced it, and beating the boss 2,000 each. The Party Arch pays everyone from 100 to 1,000 by the team's speed; on the Treat Slide a sweet is 20 and the bow adds up to 1,000. Alone, your score goes to the leaderboard; a round that gains a drop-in posts nothing.

In a Race there is no team and no MVP: the card shows the places in the seat colours, first to fourth.

Tips

• Roll down every hill and zoom up the next. That is where the speed is, and a roll or a zoom is the only way through a cardboard wall — and the candle behind it.
• Falling behind costs nothing but a moment: the disc brings you back to the pack, so run at your own pace.
• On the boss, aim for the glowing button, not the body: rolling into his side only bounces you off. Run against the Leaf Blower's inhale, and jump the Duster Twirl's low sweep.
• A Little Kids seat has help built in: holding down alone winds its zoom, and pushing the same wall for two seconds pops a boing bed up under it.