PETER HOSKIN reviews Everybody 1-2 Switch: How to get the party started, for you and your 100 guests

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You there! Stop what you’re doing! It’s time to have a party. Here are the rules. Everybody loves organised fun, right?

I kid, of course — but, actually, Nintendo’s new Everybody 1-2-Switch is the acceptable and enjoyable form of organised fun. It’s a collection of mini-games designed for playing when you’ve got a gaggle of friends over at yours. And it’s genuinely a blast.

The package has that Nintendo magic to it; this is a company that just understands fun and how to mass-produce it. The dozen or so mini-games — which include one where you have to blow up balloons competitively and another that’s digital musical chairs — are all tremendously enjoyable.

Nintendo’s new Everybody 1-2-Switch is the acceptable and enjoyable form of organised fun

But it’s the technological capabilities of Everybody 1-2-Switch that make it sing. Many of the mini-games are enlivened by the twisty-turny, wavy-waggly capabilities of the Switch console’s handheld controllers, but some allow you and up to 100 party guests to connect via smartphone and control things that way.

It’s this smartphone control that underlies what is perhaps my favourite game in Everybody 1-2-Switch: one that, each round, shows a colour on screen and then has you running around your real-world environment to photograph as similarly coloured an object as you can find.

I tried this out at a Nintendo event — with more people than I could summon from my own address book — and it worked so smoothly.

Everybody 1-2-Switch is a disposable kind of game. But it’s a reasonable price. So that’s decided it. We’re having a cost-effective party at mine. You bring the celery sticks. I’ll sort the organised fun.