Mario Party 2 - Which Board Gives The Most Coins?


Since I first rented it from Blockbuster back in 2000, Mario Party 2 for Nintendo 64 has been one of my most dearly loved and intensely played games.

While I never had a chance to play it with friends, I still had a blast with it, and I remember all the Saturday mornings I spent earning enough coins on the game board maps to unlock my favorite minigames from the game’s minigame shop.

The one question that niggled at me as the years went on was which of the boards offered the most coins.

Each of the boards has its own unique traps and bonus features and chances for players or gain or lose coins, or make it difficult for players to purchase stars, extremely important for the end-of-game total as each star is purchased for 20 coins, but counts as 50 coins at the final score is tallied up.

So, which board should Mario Party 2 players play to fill up the game’s coin bank as rapidly as possible?

To determine this once and for all, I set up a trial.

First, I took advantage of the game’s ability to allow human players to join in or drop out of the game at any time to set all four players as CPU controlled characters to eliminate any element of variety in human play skill and performance.

Second, I had the computer players play through each of the board maps ten times to get a decent sample size.

By subtracting the coin bank total at the end of each game from its total at the beginning it was easy to record how many coins were earned.

Once I recorded the coin totals for ten games on each of Mario Party 2’s six board maps, all I had to do is find the mean or average of the totals for each of the map’s results.

For Pirate Land for instance, I added up the ten coin totals, and then divided that number by 10 to get my average for how many coins were earned throughout the ten playthroughs.

Once I had averages for all six boards, I could arrange them from least to greatest and see which boards were the most and least profitable in terms of yielding the maximum number of coins for the coin bank.





Pirate Land

Game 1...............1229 coins
Game 2...............735   coins
Game 3...............1441 coins
Game 4...............1011 coins
Game 5...............1263 coins
Game 6..............1330  coins
Game 7...............1296 coins
Game 8...............480   coins
Game 9...............1452 coins
Game 10.............1208 coins

Average: 1114 coins

Note: Game 8, as well as possibly Game 9, had coin totals so low that they dragged this board’s average coin total down.

Game 8’s total of only 480 coins in particular might even be so low as to be considered and outlying piece of data, but this isn’t a serious data collection project, so I won’t go to deeply into that





Western Land

Game 1...............1202 coins
Game 2...............1101 coins
Game 3...............1373 coins
Game 4...............1274 coins
Game 5...............1085 coins
Game 6...............1219 coins
Game 7...............1182 coins
Game 8...............1332 coins
Game 9...............1316 coins
Game 10.............1383 coins

Average: 1246 coins




Space Land

Game 1...............1771 coins
Game 2...............1334 coins
Game 3...............1825 coins
Game 4...............1397 coins
Game 5...............1300 coins
Game 6.............. 1426 coins
Game 7...............1347 coins
Game 8...............1188 coins
Game 9...............1232 coins
Game 10.............1290 coins

Average: 1411 coins




Mystery Land

Game 1...............1486 coins
Game 2...............1527 coins
Game 3...............1216 coins
Game 4...............1449 coins
Game 5...............1384 coins
Game 6.............. 1512 coins
Game 7...............1237 coins
Game 8...............1365 coins
Game 9...............1492 coins
Game 10.............1655 coins


Average: 1432 coins




Horror Land

Game 1...............1233 coins
Game 2...............1324 coins
Game 3...............1447 coins
Game 4...............1394 coins
Game 5...............1310 coins
Game 6...............1388 coins
Game 7...............1238 coins
Game 8...............1630 coins
Game 9...............1164 coins
Game 10.............1975 coins

Average: 1410 coins




Bowser Land

Game 1...............1353 coins
Game 2...............1384 coins
Game 3...............1155 coins
Game 4...............1101 coins
Game 5...............1643 coins
Game 6...............1190 coins
Game 7...............1168 coins
Game 8...............1379 coins
Game 9...............1306 coins
Game 10.............1478 coins

Average: 1315 coins






This collected and organized data reveals that Mario Party 2’s “profitable” board map to play through in terms of total coin payout for all players is Mystery Land, with an average payout of 1432 coins.

Horror Land’s average payout of 1432 coins is 21 coins coins greater than the 1423 coin payout of Space Land, the 2nd highest paying board, and 318 coins greater than Pirate Land, the least profitable board.

While it’s to be expected that Pirate Land, the least challenging of the boards, would have the lowest payout, I found myself somewhat surprised that Bowser Land, the most difficult of the boards, didn't have the highest payout, being as unlike all other boards, the Bank spaces in Bowser Land PAY OUT coins to players rather than take them away (unless the player lands on the bank), thus theoretically putting more coins into play, though this is probably offset by the fact that Bowser Land, being a more difficult stage, has more frequent opportunities for player to lose coins, and even stars.

So if you’ve just purchased a used Mario Party 2 cartridge or downloaded it on Nintendo’s Virtual Console service and want to fill up your coin bank to buy minigames as quickly as possible, your best bet is to play in Mystery Land!






Mario Party 2 boards ranked from least to greatest in terms of average coin profitability:

6. Pirate Land..................1114 coins
5. Western Land..............1246 coins
4. Bowser Land...............1315 coins
3. Horror Land.................1410 coins
2. Space Land..................1411 coins
1. Mystery Land...............1432 coins







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