I’ll bet you didn’t know that Granny used to live in Las Vegas. Yes siree, those were the days when Granny could drive the strip any night of the week and maybe take in a show with Frank and Sammy or drop a nickle or two into the slots.

Vegas isn’t as wholesome as it was in those days, though, so Granny keeps her distance. (Although she wouldn’t mind if Grandpa would take her there to see Cirque du Soleil.)

Fortunately, with the Wii, Granny can play all of her favorite gambling games right in the safety of her own home with Vegas Party for the Wii.

The reason it’s called Vegas Party is that it’s meant to be played with all of your friends. In fact, it would probably be best if you had three friends to play it with. The trouble is that most people Granny’s age aren’t hip to lingo of the Wii (if you know what I mean) so she had to play this with her grandkids who probably shouldn’t be learning about gambling until they’re at least fifty.

But they must know something about it because they seemed to do better at the game than Granny.

There are three different modes to the game; Quickplay, Competition and A Race on the Strip. The Race is the main mode and it’s sort of a board game. Although, not a like Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders!

Each player gets to pick a character to be in the game. There are tourists and rappers and a cowgirl and even a Granny. Naturally, Granny picked the Granny.

Then you roll the dice ... except there’s only one of them and it goes from 0 to 7. Based on the roll you get, your character bounds along a game board that’s supposed to be the Vegas Strip. Granny can tell you that it’s nothing like the real Fremont street, but Wii games aren’t supposed to be reality, right?

Some squares on the board give you good things, some give you bad things. It’s was all kind of confusing for Granny, but the grandkids said it’s pretty typical for the way party games work.

If a player lands on a square outside of a casino, all of the players go into the casino and play a mini-game. The player who landed on the entrance gets to pick the game so that might give them an edge.

Some of the mini-games are just like the real thing. Granny particularly enjoyed the Blackjack mini-game. The cards were small and hard to see sometimes, but the game helpfully put the total up where Granny could see it. Roulette was a lot like the real thing, too. (Although Granny never had the courage to play roulette for real.)

Other games are games about gambling, not actual gambling games. For instance, Granny loves the slots, but the slot machine mini-game in Vegas Party isn’t like playing the slots at all. Instead, you have to guess which lines on the slot machine is going to win. Isn’t that strange? The baccarat game was about betting on which hand would win; Granny didn’t get to actually play. (Which was sort of disappointing, because Granny couldn’t afford the stakes to play in Vegas and wanted to try her hand at the game.)

Granny never did get the hang of the dart game.

The mini-games reward the winners with chips and the point of the game is to be the first to reach the end of the strip with chips still in your pocket. Just like the real Vegas, when you’re out of money, you’re out of the game.

In the Competition mode, you just play through all of the mini-games against the other players. There’s no confusing game board, but that mode is kind of boring.

Quickplay is a good way to practice the mini-games so you can get good enough to beat your friends (or grandkids.)

All-in-all, Vegas Party is no substitute for a trip to the real Las Vegas. If you have the right group of friends (and a TV big enough to let you read the cards) it could be a pleasant way to spend an evening. It is a game about gambling, so that means some parents probably won’t want their children to play it and people old enough to be interested will probably find that it gets old pretty quickly.