This one is a dud.
Off in the corner of Nintendo’s booth was a single Wii loaded up with WiiWare demos. One of the WiiWare demos on display was Picturebook Games: Pop-up Pursuit, a party game of sorts—except the party wasn’t invited.
If you took Mario Party, and cut out all of its enjoyable moments, you might wind up with Picturebook Games, because this Nintendo-published WiiWare demo consisted of only a board game. Instead of rolling dice, you play cards to move. You can choose whether to draw a card or take a coin before playing a card during your turn. As in Mario Party, squares have special events that can affect you or your opponents, such as sending them backwards, earning you additional coins, or allowing you to steal others’ cards.
But without mini-games, the “party game” experience is not at all compelling, especially since you must still sit through the CPU opponents’ turns. The pop-up cut-out look is aesthetically pleasing, but such presentational touches are pointless when paired with a completely stale concept with pretty much no fun factor. I am usually hesitant to make make final judgment calls based on E3 demos, but I’m going to make one here: this one will not be worth your time.