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Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is a Wii U game that came out late last year.  It’s a video board game featuring Animal Crossing characters, and you use Animal Crossing Amiibo figures to play it.  You must scan them on the Wii U gamepad to roll dice, save your individual progress, heck; you can’t even start the game without first scanning an Amiibo.  But there is a little more to it than that.  Along with the board game, there is a selection of eight mini-games you can unlock that use the Animal Crossing Amiibo cards that are primarily used in Happy Home Designer.  I haven’t read too many reviews online that go over these games in detail, so I’ll do that now since I like covering mini-games.

But first I’ll talk about the board game a little more.  Up to four can play, but you’ll need AC Amiibo figures, one for each player.  You can either set a time limit, or play out a full month in the game, each round of turns lasting a day in the month.  Each month has different activities like in the main games, and the board is set up in a town.  When you land on a space, you can earn or lose happy points and/or money.  You can use money to buy items that’ll help you get more money or happy points, like buying turnips on Sunday and selling them at a higher price later in the week, for instance.  Some days, other characters will come into town to change things up.  At the end of the game, whoever has the most happy points, wins.  It’s not a BAD game, per se, but it’s certainly disappointing especially after seeing how awesome a 3-D Animal Crossing game could be with the Mario Kart 8 DLC.  And the game requires no skill whatsoever to play. 

After the game is over, your happy points are turned into Happy Tickets.  You get one Happy Ticket for each 100 happy points you earn by playing the board game.  You can also earn happy points by playing the mini-games, too.   So what can you do with Happy Tickets?  Well, you can decorate the game board with houses and other items, which I don’t think change anything at all (aside from making a new path on the board).  Or you can use them to buy and unlock the mini-games.  These mini-games use the Animal Crossing Amiibo cards to play them, and the game even comes with three special cards.  Although many of the games require more than three, so that doesn’t make any sense. 

You can use the cards for other things, too.  Scan them on the menu screen to have more animals walk around your plaza, and you can also scan them into the board game town to live there and walk about as you play.  Each card also has a dice number on it, and you can scan them in if you want to roll a certain number.  Anyway, let’s take a look at the mini-games you can unlock that use the cards!

Acorn Chase

This is a single player game, and requires 3 cards.  When you scan the cards, three characters appear in a line and must gather all the acorns in a top down viewed field and then head for the exit.  To move or change direction, you must scan the correct card.  Each of the three cards represents a direction: left, right, or forward.  The tricky part is that the directions don’t change, no matter which way you’re facing.  So if you’re facing left, you still want to use the ‘forward’ card.  To make matters worse, a lawn mower with Resetti’s head on it slowly chases your team, and if it bumps into one of them, the game is over. It’s trickier than what it sounds like.

Mystery Campers

This logic game is also single player only, but requires six cards.  Four of the characters on the cards will be in tents, and you must guess which ones.  When you scan four cards, they’ll tell you how many are correct, and how many are close.  Use these clues to figure out which animal is in which tent.  You get ten tries in all.  I usually would get it in six tries or less, so it’s not too hard.

Balloon Island

1 to 4 players can enjoy this simple mini-game, and you only really need one card, unless you just want to use more characters.  It doesn’t make a difference.  Anyway, when you scan a card, that character will appear floating over an island with some balloons.  When you release the card from the scanner, the character will drop and bounce on balloons floating above the island.  You get points for popping balloons, and if you land on the target on the island, you’ll get a score multiplier.  You get three turns to do this, and whoever gets the highest score, wins.  Of course, there’s not really any way to predict how you’ll fall, so it reminds me of a cross between a pachinko machine and Monkey Target from the Monkey Ball games.

Quiz Show

An Animal Crossing quiz show sounds like a good idea, but boy are these questions hard!  One to four players can go at it, and each player needs their own card.  A question will appear on screen, and you must scan your card when the spotlight is over your character.  This can be hard since the only scanner is on the Wii U gamepad.  Then you must select the right answer on the pad.  If you get it wrong, you’ll lose the next turn.   But be careful because these questions can get hard!  You might have to know what a certain animal’s phrase is, or what kind of fish is pictured, or how big a bug is, or if a painting is fake or real!  Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you can scan other cards a certain number of times to get a lifeline.  But you don’t get that option in single player mode.  Also, single player mode is timed.  I’d enjoy this game more if the questions weren’t so hard.  Nintendo should make a trivia game about their characters and series.  I bet that would be fun!

Fruit Path

This one is a two-player game.  You each pick three cards, and that character on the card will move the number of spaces of the dice on their card.  If they see any fruit, they’ll pick it up for points.  The farther you go, the more fruit you get.  Now, you’d think you’d want to just pick cards that have high dice numbers, but that can be dangerous.  Along the path are pitfalls, and if you have too much fruit in your basket and land on a pitfall, you will fall in and lose a big chunk of your fruit that you’ve collected.  Whoever has the most fruit at the end of three turns wins.

Amiibo Card Battle

When my brother Jeff was younger, he loved card battle games like Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic, etc.  So he was a bit intrigued about this one, even though it’s not much of a card battle game.  The game takes place inside Katrina’s fortune telling tent.  Two players pick six cards.  You can pick the same cards, though, so you only need six.  You’ll pit each card against each other one at a time, and you can only use a card once.  The winner of a battle is determined by who has the highest number on the dice symbol on the card.  And if there is a tie, it’ll be determined by the rock, paper, scissors symbols on the cards.  So you’d think to pick the cards that have the highest number on the dice, right?  Well, in the middle of the table is a crystal ball, and it’ll show a Zodiac symbol each turn.  And if an animal card has that same Zodiac symbol, they’ll have an advantage.  So there’s an element of randomness to it.  Whoever wins the most battles after all the cards are used, wins.

Desert Island Escape

This is probably the most robust of all the mini-games!  It’s a single player game where you scan three cards and those characters will be on a desert island trying to escape.  You’ll move around the island in a strategy board game hexagonal format, and try to find three logs and a sail on spaces so you can leave.  But you also have limited food and a certain number of days (turns) to do it, so you have to watch out.  Each character has specific skills.  Some are good at fishing; some can move more spaces, and much more.  For instance, Resetti can dig to a faraway space, and Tortimer can sleep and give up one turn in order to move a bunch of spaces in the next turn.  You can also find items to make tools that will make it easier to gather food and such.  But most of it depends on luck, as most actions are spinner based.  But there are multiple islands and difficulty levels, so there’s a lot more to this game than meets the eye.

Resetti Bop

And the last game is a single player variation on Whack-A-Mole.  A player uses three cards, and you’ll scan those cards to whack mechanical Resetti’s when they pop out of the left, middle, and right holes.  But be careful because each mole also has a rock, paper, scissors symbol on it, and even if you scan the right card, you can still lose points if your card has a symbol that can lose to whatever the Resetti one has.  So you have to be on your toes!

Conclusions

And that’s all the games.  While I can’t really recommend this game to anyone unless you’re a huge Animal Crossing fan like me, I still wanted to write this to let everyone know there’s more to this title than just the board game part.  In the comments section, let me know if you’ve played this game and what you think of it.  Later!  --Cary