Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival on WiiU has quickly become one of our favourite games. I really like the board game style games that are available on WiiU as they’re so good for the whole family to play together, and feel a lot more social and interactive than typical games. They also don’t require a lot of skill, which means that all of the family can easily join in, from the youngest kids in the family right up to granny who isn’t really familiar with WiiU games at all!
We had got to know and love the Animal Crossing characters in other games like Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer and were really looking forward to trying them out on the Wii U with their amiibos.
Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival is a board game style game, where each round takes you through a calendar of one month of the year. You can choose from 12 boards to play, each representing one month of the year and each one has slightly different events and features, to tie in with the different seasons and festivals that would happen during that time.
The aim of the game is collect the most happy points by the end of the month. You can also collect bells, which are money and will be swapped into happy points at the end of your game.
For example, during one month you would get the Harvest Festival, and another gives you firework events every weekend. During these special events, you get different characters coming in to the game to offer special cards, or tombolas for extra points and other cool features like that.
On each turn, you place your amiibo onto the controller and then remove it again to let the dice roll, and your character moves that many spaces around the board. As you can see in the picture above, you can land on positive or negative squares, that either give you extra happy points or bells, or make you lose them. Or you can land on special event squares too. I like the little details and scenarios it shows when you land on each square, they are quite funny and something that adults playing would appreciate too.
One of our favourite parts of the game is that every Sunday, no matter which month you’re playing, a special character called Joan comes along to sell turnips and you can buy from her and then sell at different prices as you go through the week. This aspect of the game brings in a bit more skill and thought, to try to buy cheap and sell for more – although luck is still a big factor too.
To play the game, you need some of the amiibo figures, so it would be best to buy the bundle of game and figures, via somewhere like Amazon, and then you can top up with extra amiibos as you go along.
We were given four amiibos, which is the maximum amount that you can use within 1 game. We have Lottie, Tom Nook, Cyrus and Isabelle which you can see below.
All of the amiibos are really cute! I love the look of the characters, and they came out great in amiibo format. When you finish the game, every player taps their amiibo onto the wii U game pad again to power up the character with the happy points that were earned during that game, so if you use the same character each time you can work on gradually building that one up. My one is Lottie, and the 3 boys have each assigned one of the other 3 to themselves. It would be great if you could play with even more players, but then it would extend the game play even longer (it’s over 1 hour per round with 4 players) so from that perspective, it does make sense to limit to four.
With the game, you can also use Animal Crossing amiibo cards and these will help you in various mini games, outside of the main board game. Each card character has different skills and will be more suited to different games. These are the same amiibo cards that you can use with Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer on 3DS so it’s great that they are multi purpose, and the boys have been enjoying collecting these.
We would definitely recommend Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival. If you like other board game style games on Wii U like Mario Party then you would love this.
Anna Marikar, mum of four and seasoned blogger, has spent over a decade sharing her parenting journey and passion for kid-friendly crafts and free printables.
Her easy-to-follow craft ideas and practical parenting advice have transformed In The Playroom into a cherished resource for parents.
this is a great game, my daughter loves it too