#it's on sale rn for $1.74 and does so fairly often

[toobadchadlytime]

I can hide my curiosity no more, please tell me about 100% Orange Juice

=O

I just want you to know that merely by asking, you've like, made my week

100% Orange Juice is a digital board game that I very much compare to Mario Party due to both being cute, colorful, and chaotic to similar degrees. Having grown up with that series, I naturally fell in love with this a few years ago. =P And pretty much anyone can play it online as long as they have Steam, a Windows computer, and an Internet connection! There’s a whole bunch of boards, with this kind of style:

It's not quite the same as Mario Party, as there aren't really minigames, but whenever you pass by another player on the board, you can choose to stop on their space and battle with them. Each player attacks once, followed by defending/evading once (the latter two are always a choice you can make). There's also a deck of cards in the center that every player draws from that can be used like items, some of which are designed to make battles absolutely ridiculous in the best way.

Each character gets a few stars at the start of every turn, but can do a few things to get some more such as land on bonus panels, random encounter panels, or KO other players to steal half their stars. Each character gets a special Home Panel space that they can stop at to achieve Norma, or level up, whenever they reach a set goal of stars held or battles won (that you can choose from each time you complete one). The overall winner is the first player to level up 5 times.

Battles are really interesting because the "stealing half the victim's stars" aspect is really important. You could get knocked down many times in one game to the point where you're super behind, but then make up for all of that in an instant with One Really Good Victory in which your foe had a ton of stars! And that one move can make you go from dead last to virtually unstoppable at the right moment.

I also like them a lot because every character has a unique playstyle! And the roster has like, more than 70 characters at this point (and counting - a new pair releases every few months or so), all of which work differently!

For example you have QP who's your jack-of-all-stats character, average HP and average rolls for every battle stat:

Every character gets a unique Hyper ability as well! QP for instance, while being otherwise average, has one of the most effective Hypers in the game, in which she gets a big attack boost in battle while protecting herself from any real penalty if she is KO'd in the battle in which the card is played.

An example of a more risk/reward character would be Suguri, who is extremely good at dodging... unless she rolls low and gets KO'd in one hit. It's sort of a meme to say that Suguri lives either by being Very Fast or Very Dead. =P But she can be one of the most powerful characters if the game feels like being nice to you!

But she also gets a Hyper in which she rolls double dice for all actions on a given turn. She could roll snake eyes, or attack up to 13. And because that double dice also applies to movement, she could easily play the card from right behind another player and move onto their space.

There are a lot of other playstyles as well! You have your regular glass cannons, your tanks...

There’s another character who can be either a glass cannon or a tank whose Hyper toggles between them, another character who is one or the other just based on whether the turn number is even or odd...

But also more unique ones, like one of my (multiple) go-to favorites, Miusaki! (Though she is part of a DLC character pair that's a few bucks, which is a thing that happens)

That passive ability of hers is really powerful, because some special attack could have the strength of a truck, and merely by picking Defend in response, she still takes a mere 2 damage from it. But because her Defense stat is so low, she's likely to roll bad from it and almost definitely take her max of 2 damage, so at any moment she's either temporarily impossible to KO, or one light feathery tap away from death.

One reason I love her in particular is that she practically recontextualizes one of the most ordinary types of card that you can bring to the central deck, Saki's Cookie.

If she plays that card while at 2 HP, healing up to 3 instantly makes her go from "almost guaranteed to die in the next battle" to "guaranteed to survive the next battle”. And this is a card that you pretty much have unlocked at the start.

There are definitely more characters I could go into, but in general there's a lot of room for experimentation with strategy, seeing what neutral-use cards synergize with which character types, and just seeing how luck works out for you. Plus there's plenty to do solo and colorful outfits to unlock and stuff.

One of my favorite LP groups, TheRunawayGuys, recently did a big LP of the game. If you want a visual overview of how a game typically goes (I feel there’s only so much to explain without seeing a round in action), I'd recommend watching the first 1 or 2 boards that they do, if you want! Jon does a great job explaining how the game works. ^^