Not a minigame, but Maniac Mansion being within The Day of the Tentacle is probably my fav.
Let’s be real, Witcher 3 is just a Gwent launcher.
Also I’ve definitely played more Pazaak than KOTOR.
In another life I wouldn’t understand a word of these sentences lol
Puuure pazaak
I honestly don’t like Gwent. Maybe never got into it enough.
I literally could never understand how to play Pazaak. To me it’s just a weird version of Blackjack
Probably not what you are asking for, but the character creation process in the Traveller ttRPG is a great mini game. You basically take a person from 18 to however old you want, and their life path is dictated by your choices and random dice outcomes. It’s a lot of fun. You can end up with a retired admiral, a prisoner or criminal, psionic, etc. Going through this process with a table of friends let’s you build in rich fun connections along the way. The actual RPG then starts with mature, connected characters with a history, instead of 4 randos meeting in a tavern. In the classic Traveller you can even die in character creation. Current iterations removed the death component but you can be maimed from accidents in your career and start the game with a mountain of medical debt.
Treedude in superhot
And… Umm
Mario party
I loved the Chao Garden in the Sonic Adventure games.
Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast was peak Sonic. Those things in the controller had a minigame within a minigame for extra costumes and food for the chao.
Pretty much every minigame in Majora’s Mask is making you forget the world is ending
I thought of another one. There is a minigame in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 called Tiger! Tiger that is great. it is basically an arcade game where getting certain scores gives you credits that can be redeemed for upgrades for some characters. The minigame is randomized and has three different difficulty tiers and is overall really well done.
Not sure if it will count, but the Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 (SNES) was a game in and of itself. It was basically a roguelike dungeon. 100 random floors, it reverts you to level 1 and there were rare special items you could sometimes find in runs that could be brought back in. Beating the Ancient Cave is much, much harder and more rewarding than beating the game itself (storyline aside).
The hunting game in Oregon Trail.
Caravan from Fallout: New Vegas has a notoriously bad tutorial, but is easy enough to grasp and fun as an early-game money source. Would have benefited from a Gwent-style sidequest chain.
Maniac Mansion: day of the tentacle includes the full first maniac Mansion game on weird Ed’s computer in the room with him and the hamster
EverQuest /gems and /pizza
I had a lot more trouble with Maniac Mansion than DotT, I always got all my characters thrown in the dungeon. My favorite thing about it, at least the version on Weird Ed Edison’s computer, was that it played music using the pc speaker, which is now a concept lost to time.
Sonic Adventure 2 has a pretty decent adventure platformer built into it
Geometry Wars in Project Gotham Racing 2.
Didn’t rocket league originate from a minigame ?
Triple triad from Final Fantasy 8.
