Super Mario Run tips to help you master Toad Rally

Super Mario Run’s main World Tour mode is brilliant fun, but it’s the Toad Rally mode that will keep your attention in the weeks and months to come.

You’ll soon realise one thing about Toad Rally though: it can be really difficult. There are some real Mario experts out there and racing against their ghosts can be intimidating.

While beating opponents will still take raw Mario talent, we’ve put together seven expert tips to help you improve your chances of winning.

In Toad Rally the aim is to collect as many coins as possible. You get most of them when you’re in Coin Rush mode, which activates when you fill a blue bar. The quickest way to fill it is by killing enemies, but there are other ways that you may not be aware of.

Any time Mario falls from a height he’ll do a roll when he lands: jump out of the roll and the bar will fill slightly. It’ll also fill whenever you do a spin jump (by tapping again in mid-air). Get into the habit of jumping out of every roll and doing spin-jumps whenever it’s safe and you’ll find yourself getting Coin Rushes far more frequently.

Each of the Toad Rally levels are just chunks from the World Tour mode’s stages mashed up in a random order. The more stages you beat in World Tour, the more variety there is in the Toad Rally levels, so completing World Tour altogether will unlock the most possible stages.

This could work in your favour: by beating the later levels you’ll increase the chances of the Toad Rally stages featuring tricky sections, which could in turn lead to your opponent dying more times and giving you the edge.

Of course, you still need to actually be good at the game, but at least by this point you should know what you’re doing because you’ll have already beaten each section in World Tour.

Although the Toad Rally levels are made of random stage sections, the sections themselves never change in terms of enemy and item placement. As you play Toad Rally, learn which sections have Stars and where to find them.

These could make or break your match because Stars are immensely powerful: not only do they make you invincible (giving you coins every time you kill an enemy), they also trigger a Coin Rush, and, best of all, turn Mario into a sort of coin magnet, pulling any nearby coins over to him. It’s possible to get hundreds of coins with a single Star.

There are six characters in the game, each of whom can be unlocked in different ways. As you get them you may be tempted to use them in Toad Rally, but be careful because some are more of a help than a hindrance.

Make sure the character you choose is suitable for the stage you’re using. Toad is the fastest character in the game so he’s useful for fairly basic environments like the desert and grass stages where you’re unlikely to die much. Unlike Mario, though, he can’t use mushrooms to grow – one hit will always kill him – so in stages like the airship where you’ll take hits regularly, stick with Mario so you can afford to get hit without dying. Speaking of which…

The point of Toad Rally is to collect different coloured Toads each time you win. Each colour unlocks different buildings and scenery as you gather more of them, so you’ll want to get a mix of them.

The thing is, each environment gives you different types of Toad – Desert stages give you reds and yellows, while Ghost Houses give you reds and purples. The Airship stages are the only ones that give you all five types of Toad (red, yellow, blue, green and purple) so if you can master those you’ll never find yourself stuck and unable to get any of a certain colour.

Any time an Airship stage is on offer, select it. You may lose them at first but the more you play, the more you’ll learn each potential section.

Rage quitting is one of the worst things a player can do in any online game. In Toad Rally though, it’s actually a good move (if a sneaky one). You see, if you lose a Toad Rally match you’re actually punished more for playing well: get a lot of Toads cheering for you and they’ll all leave your Kingdom when you lose. If you die fairly early or it just isn’t looking good for you, quitting early will mean you only lose the Toads who were cheering for you at the time, meaning you lose less than if you’d kept going to the end. Even better, you get back your Toad Rally ticket, meaning you get to spend it again.

Sometimes you’re up against an evenly matched opponent and things are looking tight, but when the Rally is over it turns out they’ve battered you. Eh? The secret lies in your enemy level. Each of the game’s enemies has a gauge which increases every time you kill one: fill the gauge and your enemy level will rise, giving you more coins for each kill. This can be the difference between a good run and a great run: killing 30 Goombas in a stage can mean 30, 60, 90 or 120 coins depending on how what your Goomba level is.