After playing Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival and going through its tutorial, players can choose exactly which month they’d like to experience in-game. While each month has its moments, ones with special holidays are the best. Animal Crossing is known for special, seasonal visitors, and the Nintendo Wii U board game is no exception.
Each holiday handles a little differently in-game. Most are minor occasions. When these come up, a standard positive or negative space will have an event related to the day, rather than some major happening occurring board-wide. On April 1st, as an example, landing on a positive or negative space will trigger an encounter with Blanca and attempting to determine if your neighbor is who they say to be or the trickster in disguise. A Weeding Day will trigger an event with Leif.
If you really want an additional, fun objective in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, it’s best to shoot for a major holiday. These are Festivale in February, Bunny Day in April, Halloween in October, the Harvest Festival in November, and Toy Day in December. These events cause a special visitor to appear and provide a great opportunity to earn Happy Points or additional Bells.
In 2015, Festivale comes first. Pave arrives in the plaza and all of the spaces turn into feather spaces. There are ones of each color and occasionally rainbow feathers. While Pave only wants specific color feathers in the Animal Crossing games, he’ll do a dance and award Happy Points for any color here. If you happen to land on a rainbow feather square, you get even more Happy Points than normal. Egg Day, which arrives in April in 2015, functions in the same way. All squares become egg spaces of varying colors, and Zipper the Bunny gives away Happy Points in varying amounts depending on which color you land on.
Halloween is probably the most interesting event in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. Jack wants a specific number of candies by the end of the month. (In a two player game, that’s 80.) The additional goal is for all players to cooperate to earn over 80 candies by October 31. Candies will appear around the board in groups of three and five, and passing through them adds them to the overall total. It’s fun since everyone’s working together toward a common goal, even though you’re still trying to earn more Happy Points and Bells to outdo the other players.
The Harvest Festival is similar, but briefer. The day before and of Thanksgiving, all the spaces turn into food spaces. Franklin wants to make a feast for all the players, but needs every ingredient. You really only need three items, but grabbing the fourth, special ingredient results in additional happy points if you get enough items to make the meal. Grabbing an ingredient for the first time provides the person who grabbed it extra points, which is a nice bonus. Again, it’s fun because you’re earning solo profits, but also working together as a group to hit all the squares.
Sadly, Toy Day doesn’t get the same attention as other holidays. On December 24, Jingle comes to town. He’ll do one nice thing to benefit all players. The first time I encountered him in a playthrough, he greatly increased the price of turnips. (Some squares were offering prices of over 600 Bells.) The second time, he gave each player 4,000 Bells. His gift varies each time, but you’re guaranteed one good thing when he shows up.
Finally, there’s there are amiibo birthdays, the unexpected holiday. If one of the people playing is using a NFC figure that has a birthday that month, some squares will turn into cake squares. For example, Isabelle and Digby share a December 20th birthday. On that day, players who aren’t the birthday character and land on the cake square attend the party, giving Happy Points to the player who landed there and the birthday character. If the birthday boy or girl lands on a cake space, naturally they also receive Happy Points.
Generally, the takeaway is that any holiday in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is an opportunity to get additional Happy Points that could help someone win the game. Going with a month where an additional visitor stops by could improve your experience, and you should make sure you try playing through October or November at least once each so you can compete cooperatively.
