And they're all weird.
The opposite of Unexpected Gameplay Change. The game consists of a series of puzzles, challenges and games with very different requirements for defeating them. Sometimes it has a Board Game theme and Competitive Multiplayer, at which point it may overlap with Party Game.
When the minigames overrun another type of game, that is Gameplay Roulette.
Quite a few TV Game Shows are also like this, making this trope older than video games themselves.
Examples:
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Video Games
- 1-2-Switch
- The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon
- The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour feature puzzles scattered across the house, solving each unlocks more rooms and a piece of the story.
- 198X
- Clandestiny works the same way.
- Action 52.
- Adventure Fun-Pak
- Amazing Island crosses this with a Mons game, by allowing you to use as your players monsters you've created.
- Anticipation for NES
- Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! for the Game Boy Color. You have to win 16 minigames (and there are only 10, so you'll have to play some multiple times) to... unlock five more minigames. The minigames themselves include kart racing, sorting candy and books, delivering newspapers, cooking pancakes, and such.
- Barbie Super Model
- Big Fun in Furbyland
- Bomberman Land
- Bonkers for the Sega Genesis consists of four mini-games with many levels, which Bonkers has to complete in order to capture one of Toontown's four most wanted criminals.
- Cars for the Nintendo DS.
- Cart Life
- Cinemaware favored this with their "interactive movies." Each game was built around a story (to the extent that the pause feature was often called an "intermission"), and each aspect of gameplay was a separate minigame.
- Defender of the Crown had a strategic map, battles, and action games for raids, jousting and sieges (where the player controlled a catapult).
- The King Of Chicago had a Visual Novel quality to its storyline, interspersed with large-scale shootouts, bombings, one-on-one gunfights, and a map-and-ledger area where you managed your gang. Oh, and a random craps minigame.
- SDI put you in the cockpit of the United States' SDI system, in charge of both piloting a space fighter (both to shoot down Soviet craft and repair your satellites) and the satellites' laser systems (to shoot down each wave of Soviet missiles), as well as managing the repairs on everything. And you have to constantly switch between these tasks in the middle of a war. Finally, in the endgame, you have to fly over to the Russian station to rescue your Capulet Counterpart through a shooting sequence.
- Clubhouse Games is a collection of board games, card games, skill games and more.
- Cook, Serve, Delicious!
- Cooking Mama
- The Coraline video game is a rare blend of an Action-Adventure game involving a lot of minigames.
- Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage, one of the Crash Bandicoot / Spyro the Dragon crossover games for the Gameboy Advance.
- Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy, the other crossover game.
- Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!
- Devolver Bootleg is a collection of demakes by Devolver Digital based on their other titles.
- The Castle of Dr. Brain, an Edutainment game created by Sierra in the early 90's which featured a long sequence of puzzles, each meant to test a different mental skill. It featured, among many others, a Magic Square Puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle, a maze, and so on. The original game was followed by several sequels.
- Feel the Magic: XY/XX and The Rub Rabbits!, basically Sega's answer to WarioWare.
- The Lolo series. Ostensibly just brain teaser games, they tend to vary widely among logic puzzles, problems with unobvious solutions, and even a little arcade action.
- Final Legacy, which attaches multiple minigames to a main metagame.
- Fuzion Frenzy
- Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun for the Neo Geo Pocket Color features a virtual pet who creates minigames.
- Geekwad Series: Both Wacky Funsters: A Geekwad's Guide To Gaming and The Geekwad: Games Of The Galaxy mostly consist of playing five minigames.
- Go Vacation is a collection of sports and other activities contained within a large island hub.
- The flash game series Hoshi Saga.
- Several mid-1980s games by Tim Huntington combined different arcade games. Each individual minigame would have made an OK standalone game back then.
- In Despatch Rider you drive your bike through a maze-like city. At the destination you either catch parcels thrown out of windows, or throw parcels through addressees' doors.
- In Fire Chief you alternatively drive a car with a flasher through the crowded highway or rescue important objects from a burning building. Also featured a semi-comprehensible cutscene.
- Incredible Crisis for the PS1.
- Cliff Johnson's puzzle games (The Fool's Errand, At the Carnival, 3 in Three) fall into this genre.
- There is also this semi-obscure PC game of Jumanji which was a group of themed "levels" selected individually based on the movie, with no end other than dying and typing in your high score (like Donkey Kong without the kill screen). There actually was one level that could be beaten.
- In Kitty Powers' Matchmaker, the date portion involves completing a number of random small tasks ranging from calculating a bill, completing a simple match 3 game, to remembering one of the date's interests. This is also present in Kitty Powers' Love Life, where responding to a villager's Partner Panic alert involves minigames such as finding the correct pipe to fix the boiler and spraying the bugs infesting their partner's newly bought fruit.
- Kuukiyomi is a series of minigame games where the player is thrust into a series of "situations" and has to figure out what to do, like a slower-paced version of Warioware.
- Landfall Archives
- Later Alligator: Each of the gators provides a puzzle, usually in three rounds, you need to solve to progress with the questioning.
- Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, which takes the rough premise of the old Leisure Suit Larry games (loser tries to get laid) and swaps out the Point-and-Click Game elements in favor of minigames for conversation, dancing, playing quarters, streaking, and other Wacky Fratboy Hijinx.
- Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck
- Given a unique twist in Mario Adventure: World 7, "Desert Dares", where each level is just one screen, with a catch, you either have to make a tricky jump, collect all the coins in time, or survive for a certain amount of time.
- Mario Party. Like so many other things that Mario has done, it's also the Trope Codifier. Games with their own pages:
- MicroProse was doing this often during the late 80's and early 90's.
- Sid Meier's Pirates!: The main premise is, of course, a real-time naval simulator with RPG Elements that govern your abilities in various areas. Engaging another vessel takes you to a smaller-scale real-time combat map where you duel the enemy ship. Cargo (pirated or otherwise) can be sold in local ports, where you can also engage in Adventure Game-style dialogue at the local tavern. Dancing and swordfighting are both Rhythm Games, land combat is Turn-Based Strategy, prison escapes are Stealth Based Missions... The list goes on.
- In Covert Action, the theme is espionage, and you need to play minigames for decrypting messages, placing wiretaps, breaking into terrorist cells, and tailing suspects in your car. Then there's Sword of the Samurai, with three completely different kinds of real-time combat (one-on-one swordfight, group melee inside or outside, and army-on-army battles). Unfortunately, neither game was as successful as Pirates!.
- Mini Mix Mayhem for mobile devices.
- Minna No Tennis, a GBA game based on The Prince of Tennis.
- Mizuiro Blood
- Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival
- MySims Party
- NES Remix does this with several NES games.
- Night of the Living Robot consists of four minigames in noticeably different styles, each representing one of Felix's nightmares.
- Nintendo Labo's Variety Kit offers a set of minigames to play with the included Toy-Con patterns.
- Nintendo Land might count depending on one's definition of minigame. The game's main 12 games have roughly the level of depth of NES titles, but it's still a collection of games that are simple by the standards of 2012.
- NitorInc.: Touhou Microgames!, a Touhou Project-themed Fan Game based on WarioWare.
- Norrland
- Pac-Man Fever
- Pac-Man Party
- Peter Panic
- Pictionary for the NES, due to the original's subjective nature.
- Planet 404
- PlayStation Move Heroes
- Point Blank (1994).
- Tenkomori Shooting is a spinoff of Point Blank, as a Vertical Scrolling Shooter rather than a Light Gun Game.
- PortaBoy+ is a Disguised Horror Story that combines this with Survival Horror, with the minigames rewarding the funds that you need to survive the horrors.
- Professor Layton consists of dozens and dozens of individual brainteasers tied together with a mystery story.
- Puzzle Pirates does this in a massive-multiplayer environment. Some of the puzzles are somewhat similar, with slightly different rules, but some are quite different from the rest (like the Alchemy puzzle and Battle Navigation). New mini-games are introduced periodically for actions that used to be automatic.
- Raving Rabbids
- Retro Game Challenge is similar to this, but the games themselves are full length games. So it's more like a... Game Game?
- All of the games in the Rhythm Heaven series.
- Rugrats: Royal Ransom: Justified as the game takes place in a playground-like machine built by Stu.
- Sabrina The Animated Series: Magical Adventure
- Salamander County Public Television
- Shmups Skill Test, as part of the premise of testing your Shoot 'Em Up abilities.
- Sonic Shuffle.
- Sonic and the Secret Rings uses a board game format for its multiplayer game.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, Pants! (PS2, Xbox and Gamecube versions) has the players compete in minigames to star in a movie. Each area/scene has three varied minigames to play in.
- SpongeBob SquigglePants
- SPOOKWARE: A cute and horror-themed take on the genre in an episodic adventure format.
- Stay Tooned! is a point-and-click game densely populated by minigames with the point-and-click aspects greatly downplayed. Minigames range from a single-screen Platform Game to a "Test Your Strength" Game to a trivia quiz to a full-on parody of Mortal Kombat. Some minigames are required to proceed, some provide rewards if cleared or certain milestones achieved, and most are just for you to have fun playing and beat the challenge scores provided. Due to the unpredictable nature of the game, minigames can turn up almost anywhere.
- Thrillville has a variety of minigames players can partake in based on what they include in their theme parks, from arcade games to FPS segments where they take on robot adversaries.
- Time Cruise can be seen as this, as the main pinball game is seen by some players as a mechanism to activate the various minigames.
- Bally/Midway made games that are basically four games that must be played over and over to complete a level:
- TRON
- Journey 1983 arcade game based on the rock band Journey.
- Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure
- WarioWare. Many of the games lasting precisely five seconds. They're so small that they're considered microgames. Games with individual pages:
- Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Play: Motion, and Wii Sports Resort. Wii Party also has very heavy elements of this trope, especially Board Game Island.
- YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!, which is a collection of puzzles based on false advertisements for mobile phone games.
- Lazy Jones for the C64.
- Help Wanted
- Bishi Bashi
- The 3 Stooges
- Ken Uston's Puzzle Panic for the Commodore 64.
- The Puzzle & Action series (Tant-R, Ichidant-R, Sand-R).
- Goosebumps HorrorLand
- Pigs In Space, an Atari 2600 game based on a segment from The Muppet Show, was three minigames in one, based on Space Invaders, Frogger, and Vanguard.
- An old DOS game named Fun House had the player performing three random challenges before eventually running through a maze.
Game Shows
- American Gladiators
- Beat the Clock (1950)
- The Crystal Maze
- The Cube
- Don't
- Double Dare (1986) becomes this when a team chooses to take a Physical Challenge instead of answering a question.
- Ellen's Game of Games
- El gran juego de la oca
- Family Challenge
- Family Game Night
- High Rollers: The 1987 revival, which involved a series of mini-games where prizes were determined by the roll of a die. These games would be played only by provisionally earning the right to play the game (through clearing the column where it was placed with a good roll) and then later winning the game. Typical games assigned numbers to various prizes or outcomes, with prizes awarded depending on the outcome. Examples:
- An "Around the World" game saw five different destinations announced and assigned a number from 1 to 5, and the contestant won that trip by rolling that number; rolling a 6 won all the trips (hence, a "trip around the world") and a cash bonus.
- "Wink's Garage Sale," which contained usually four prizes of $500-2,000, a grand prize of more than $3,000, and a smaller prize of up to $100.
- "Dice Derby," which saw two horses - "Odd" and "Even" - compete in a race, with a particular horse advancing one space depending on the number rolled. Depending on which horse finished first, one awarded a cash prize (usually, $1,000) and the other a grand prize of a trip, a fur coat or a car.
- Hollywood Game Night, where two teams of celebrities lead by a non-famous contestant play several games to see which team can make it to the Bonus Round.
- Let's Make a Deal (1963)
- Minute to Win It
- Nickelodeon GUTS
- 1000 Heartbeats
- The Price Is Right: The 1972 revival, initially titled The New Price is Right and still airing to this day, retooled the format to focus more on having contestants play "pricing games" to win prizes, after earning their way on-stage by competitively guessing the price of an item without going over. The original version of the format, circa 1956, placed a larger focus on the bidding aspect.
- Richard Osman's House of Games
- Schlag den Raab
- Time Machine (1985)
- Tokyo Friend Park II
