One early afternoon in September 2023, I was on the couch focused on my phone playing Mario Kart Tour. I had been trying for almost an hour trying to hit a personal high score. I came close a few times. After one race, I complained in a private Discord that I hadn’t yet succeeded, and turned off my phone’s screen recording.

And then all I could do was laugh. Because the very next race I not only set a personal high score, I achieved the highest all-time score among anybody.

Mario Kart Tour

In Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s mobile version of their Mario Kart franchise, you aren’t just trying to win as fast as you can. You’re trying to win, and accumulate as many actions (picking up coins, jumping off ramps, hitting opponents with items, etc.) as you can.

Nintendo released the game in 2019 and actively supported it up until fall 2023. It was a financial success for Nintendo, bringing in $200+ million on hundreds of millions of installs.

Personally, the last Nintendo console I bought was the original Wii, so while my friends and I still break out Mario Kart Double Dash for the GameCube every few months, it was nice to have another Mario Kart game accessible.

Aside from the concept of actions, there are a few other key differences to other Mario Kart games you might be more familiar with.

Primarily single-player

Though there is a multiplayer mode, you are usually racing against bots. Other people play against bots, too and you try to get better scores than they did.

Rotating tracks

The game has an impressive 546 courses in its library, but only makes around 40 available in a two-week “tour”. These included old Mario Kart favorites (ex. Baby Park), some brand-new concepts (ex. Ninja Hideaway), and also new concepts modeled after cities (ex. London Loop). The latter is where the name “Tour” comes from.

Tracks have variants

The game developers broke existing Mario Kart courses like Rainbow Road into variants — one normal, one in reverse (you still move forward but you start at the end and race the opposite direction to the beginning), a turbo (more ramps and coins to get actions), and a reverse/turbo.

Each variant has a “top shelf”

For every track, there are a set of items (driver, kart, and glider) that score better, so you can’t really use your favorite driver every time if you want to compete. There 26 different versions of Mario, though, if you manage to collect them all. In total, there are 265 drivers, 336 karts, and 238 gliders available in the game to choose from.

New driver special skills added

While fan favorites like the Fire Flower and Yoshi’s Egg still exist in the game, there are a handful of other special skills added into Mario Kart Tour that became the meta (dominant strategy).

The first is Coin Box (pictured below), which doesn’t really help you win the race, but spits out coins in front of you. Since every coin you drive into is an action, you can get 20-30 actions off one Coin Box. Compare that to a banana, where you get one action if you hit your opponent with it.

Credit: Mario.fandom.com

The second is Boomerang, which can hit nearby opponents, break objects on the track like barrels, and collect nearby coins. It’s most effective when you race against a bot driver using Coin Box, and you try to use your Boomerang to collect the coins from the Coin Box. The advantage of Boomerang in this scenario is that it collects all coins it’s near, whereas when you use a Coin Box driver you have to drive through the coins yourself. Anyway, here’s an example video.

Which of Coin Box and Boomerang is better usually depends on the specific track variant, though most players prefer to use Coin Box as it’s often easier to get a good score with.

Stars replaced by frenzies

Instead of the Star item, Mario Kart Tour uses “frenzies” for invincibility. You get a frenzy when you roll three item boxes that are of the same item at the same time. And then as part of that frenzy, you get to use that item many times. So if you want to catch up to 1st place, a Red Shell, Blue Shell, or Mushroom frenzy can be very helpful.

The anatomy of a world record

I’ve set the world record on 10 tracks, though at the time of this writing I am only the reigning record holder on three (four on original writing) of them — the reverse variants of Paris Promenade and DK Pass, and the normal variant of RMX Mario Circuit 1.

From my experience, there’s a few boxes you need to tick to get one:

RNG (random number generation)

To get top scores, you need frenzies. But only certain frenzies are actually high-scoring. If you’re using a Coin Box or Boomerang driver, you want primarily those frenzies. Coin, Mushroom, Blooper, Blue Shell, and Lightning frenzies can also be good but not as powerful.

You can get up to three frenzies in a race. Most tracks will have six total item box rolls in a race (once a race you can use an Item Ticket for an extra box, however). And you can’t roll a frenzy twice in a row.

So it can be time-consuming to get the right combination of RNG. It can be quite repetitive, just resetting the race after the first item roll if you don’t get anything good.

Good lines

Probably the least important of the three. But each track will have different paths and ways you can drive. Squeezing out an extra five actions per lap can be crucial when every action counts.

Skill

The most important of the three. Everyone gets the same RNG in the long run. But you need to be good enough to convert on the RNG you’re given, or even overachieve what you’re given. There’s a reason a small number of players like Danny and Crazi hold a disproportionate number of world records.

Aiming high, landing higher

Every tour, to try to entice users to play more, Nintendo offers a way to earn tokens to exchange for in-game rewards. They alternate each tour how you can earn them: one tour you get tokens from making your opponents crash and in the other tour some coins are replaced with special token coins.

Most of the time, tokens are a hindrance for players using Coin Box drivers. For whatever reason, they have different trajectories than normal coins. There also lies a tradeoff. Tokens are easier to hit and collect, but Coin Box can also spit out some red coins worth two actions instead of one and you get fewer red coins if you have tokens.

If a player is trying for a high score with a Coin Box driver, they might try to collect the max number of tokens (after which they disappear and coins go back to normal) before spending any time on it.

In my case, I was just casually playing the reverse variant of DK Pass (aka DK Pass R) when I realized that on this track, with a lot of straightaways, the token trajectory might actually be better than normal coins. I’d try to turn the obstacle into a utility. 

I checked the world record (287 actions) and found I’d gotten within striking distance a few times without really trying for it. And by the time I played again the next day, it had already been beaten twice by very skilled players — first to 288 actions and then to 310 actions.

310 actions is insane. Very few players have ever hit 300 actions. I’m one of a handful to have done it multiple times. But at that time I had never done it. I was not expecting to top 300 actions, but thought I could get to 300.

I made three minor decisions that proved helpful before getting started:

1. When you’re trying to collect coins from a Coin Box, bigger karts are better. We mentioned the idea of “top shelf” items earlier — here I used a kart not on the top shelf since it was bigger. This is somewhat controversial but allowed and common among world records.
2. Glider items have a minor impact on which items you roll. I used a Lightning glider since I planned to be at the front of the pack (where you can’t roll Lightning) and it wouldn’t interfere with rolling a Coin Box. (You can roll a Banana, for example, in 1st, so using a Banana glider and boosting your Banana odds is counterproductive.)
3. I weakened the bots by losing a bunch of times on purpose (the bots get tougher when you win, and easier when you lose). This increased the chance I’d win the race after getting the RNG I needed.

DK Pass R was one of the tracks in the game that has a total of eight item boxes per race. It also has two different ways to hit extra item boxes. First, there’s a ramp at the first item box you can fall off and get another item. You are at risk of falling behind your opponents, though. Second, after the second item box, there’s a hill containing an extra box.

More boxes gives you more opportunities for a frenzy or for single Coin Boxes. However, I decided I would not necessarily chase them for a few reasons.

• With eight boxes already, a good run was fairly likely to already have three frenzies. I didn’t need to get desperate.
• Falling off the ramp on the first lap of the race would cap my upside for how good I could be doing after the first two item boxes of the race. It would also rely on getting back to 1st place with a Mushroom frenzy, something that’s fine normally but limits my chances to get to an outlier 300 action score. On the second lap, I could play by ear and go for one extra box if I thought 2nd place couldn’t catch me.
• The extra box on the hill was too close to the third item box of each lap. If you hit a box in a frenzy, you can roll more items after the frenzy ends. But if you hit two item boxes, you only get one extra roll and not two. Going after the box on the hill would maximize the number of boxes I hit but not necessarily increase the number of items I rolled. Plus, it was easier to collect coins on the normal path.

There wasn’t much more to it. I was good enough to capitalize on some insane luck. I got close a few times pretty quickly. An hour in, I struck gold.

Most players aim for two Coin Box frenzies and two single Coin Boxes for good scores. A world record might be that same sequence plus another frenzy or single Coin Box.

My run turned out to be a Banana frenzy, Coin Box frenzy, Coin frenzy, and five single Coin Boxes. Pretty much every item box I hit in the race turned into something useful. It’s not a world record item sequence you see a lot.

That was good for 341 actions, shattering the previous record. It was also tied for the most actions ever recorded in a Mario Kart Tour race in the four-year history of the game. Nice.

Here are the screenshots of the score and proof of action count that I used to submit the world record to the community leaderboard.

Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile

Sometimes people just need to know something is possible before they pursue it. That happened with Roger Bannister. He ran the first four-minute mile in history. Several others did it shortly after. Almost immediately I felt a target on my record’s back.

A handful of players tried to top 341 actions on DK Pass R. One got pretty close — they’re a pretty good player who’s spent over 50 hours trying to beat 341. I was resigned to it happening. If someone is going to spend unlimited time, they’ll eventually get even crazier RNG than I did. As of this writing I still hold the track record.

In March 2024, however, my record for most actions in any track ever was broken. If I was going to lose it, I’m glad it was by one of the top players in the world. They got 348 actions using the Boomerang skill on Waluigi Pinball’s reverse variant. Second place to that is fine, too.

For someone who’s probably not in the top 100 in terms of most skilled players, it was cool to leave my mark in the record books. A few days after my DK Pass R record, I also hit 303 actions on the turbo variant (DK Pass T), making me one of the only players to hit 300 actions twice.

Before I more or less retired from the game, I also took a shot at a feat usually reserved for the biggest spenders, ranking in the top 10 worldwide.