You look at the XBOX 360 launch lineup in Japan and you realize why it’s not selling well. One of the launch titles that was integral in selling as many as 700 360s is a little first party Microsoft game by the name of Every Party. You’d think former Capcom producer Yoichi Okamoto's new studio would produce something epic but that’s not the case as Every Party is nothing more than a high tech board game.

In Every Party you compete against three other players which can be of the computer variety or even real if you have friends or XBOX Live. The gameplay plays out just like any other board game; each player spins a wheel, moves a certain number of positions on the board, and does something based on the square they land on. Some tiles you land on will give you gold coins, some will let you spend your gold coins to move farther ahead or hurt another player and some even do random things like give your gold coins to another player. In addition to the gold coins there are other stats to deal with along the way and you can even collect up to five different spin wheels.

These spin wheels are what’s used to determine how many spaces a player moves during their turn and are pictured below the player’s avatar while in the game. Once you use a spin wheel it will be discarded if it is not one of your two default spin wheels that can always be used. Some of these wheels are downright evil and only have 1s and 2s on them while others require skill to stop the spinning arrow on a sliver that might let the player move 12 places.

Once you’ve spun your wheel and selected a tile to move to on the playing board you’ll be show your character moving through the board which has been plastered onto a virtual city’s streets. The cities and characters are all modeled well but nothing you see screams next gen. If anything it screams free web download. The only other time you see the cities up close and personal are during story segments that precede single player story mode games. With the graphics barely ever being shown off you really have to wonder why Microsoft made this a launch title as this could have easily been created for the original Playstation or the DS or PSP.

If you actually get into playing the game there is a lot to discover and unlock. There are so many spin wheels, 37 in all, that the manual comes with a pullout that is eight pages long which describes every one of them. There is also a pretty much endless array of boards to play on. They range from small to large and even from hostile to rewarding. Some boards might look extremely long until you play a game on them and find out that every other tile lets you skip forward five steps or more. There’s also a huge amount of avatars, 400 in total, you can choose to be your representative in cyber board game land.