Even during a time when the Animal Crossing series was pumping out low-quality spin-offs, fresh off the massive success of New Leaf, Amiibo Festival stands out as the worst of the bunch. The most agonizingly slow, boring, unfun board game imaginable with forgettable little scenarios to read every now and then. Cute and sweet on the surface, but lacks charm and heart. And then you have to use amiibo to even play the thing, which essentially acts as simply a button press. If you can find it new or complete, I guess it's worth getting if you're an amiibo collector. Otherwise, there's nothing enjoyable here.

I like many others, bought this game thinking it’d be Mario Party but with Animal Crossing characters.

Unfortunately there is literally no mini games to play, and unless you had multiple amiibos you were forced to play with CPUs and not your friends.

There really just isn’t a “game” to this. The lack of minigames makes it just a literal walking simulator in the form of a board game. It just was such a massive disappointment it felt like a spit in the face.

Whoever greenlit this non existent game needs to be studied under a microscope.

Though this is a game, like normal Animal Crossing, that you can't really beat in the traditional sense, I've seen just about all the game has to offer, so I thought this was a good place to put my thoughts about the game. First off, this is a very simple game. If you go in looking for Animal Crossing + Mario Party, you will be sorely disappointing. This is much more along the lines of an even more simplified Animal Crossing + Fortune Street.

There's only one map, as to simulate how in Animal Crossing there is only one town, and you roll a D-6 in order to go around it with up to three friends. Also, just as in the normal game, the game tries to simluate real Animal Crossing by not having a traditional turn counter, but you go thorugh a "month" of the year where every turn is a day. The game will tell you about how long the game will take if you pick that month with how many players you have, and if you don't have that much time, then you can even set a shorter time limit and the game will just end when that time limit is up (another design choice around it being an activity for younger children). Depending on which month you pick, there are certain events that you'll get to participate in on holidays. These events range from just themed game events on that day on a day like Weeding Day, to something like Halloween where there's candy around the board to collect and it somewhat modifies your strategy for the whole game. Every week, there's a Stalk Market, just as in the real game, and you can use your money to buy turnips. You can then sell these turnips on any day that week that isn't Sunday, and the sell price is determined by which space you land on: Each space has its own sell price, and you're basically just trying to get lucky to land on a high price and make a bunch of money on your "investment" (thus the Fortune Street stocks system parallel).

You go through the month trying to earn as many happy points and bells as possible. Happy points are just that, points, and don't do anything. Bells, however, can be used in the stalk market, and are therefore more valuable (in my opinion). Whoever has the most happy points at the end of the game wins, and bells translate to happy points by 1000 bells = 1 happy point, and are usually the deciding factor in choosing a winner (in games of 3+ people). Spaces on the board are divided into good and bad, and among those are good and bad versions of bells only, happy points only, and both bells and happy points. When you land on one of these spaces, you'll see a little vignette of your character with a description, giving rationale on how they actually earned that reward. They're always cute, and depending on which character you have, you can even get character-specific ones sometimes (Resetti hanging out with his brother, Mabel working with her sisters, etc).

The "amiibo" bit of amiibo Festival is in character selection, game-play, and for mini-games and town customization. The characters selection and game-play is what the traditional 3D-figure amiibos are for. If you have a certain amiibo (Resetti, Isabelle, Mabel, etc) then you can play as that character. There's no play-style difference between the characters. The only difference is that they'll appear in the vignettes themselves, and the character-specific ones mentioned above. Additionally, as in the amiibo mode in Mario Party 10, you must tap the amiibo on the Wii U pad in order to roll your dice, meaning you all share one controller. There aren't mini-games or anything during the board-games, so funcitonally this works fine, even if it is annoying sometimes that you need to tap the amiibo to roll the dice. However, this does functinally mean that players can't roll each other's dice, so if you're playing with children, that is a good method of stopping them from taking other people's turns. You do need at least one Animal Crossing amiibo to play the game at all, but you don't need one for each player. As long as player one has a character amiibo, the other 3 people can just be humanoid villagers.

The other features have amiibo cards used for them. At the end of each game, you build up a collective total of happy points which earn you happy tickets. You can use these tickets to build attractions on the main menu which allow you to play mini-games with amiibo cards. The game comes with 3 amiibo cards, but to play all the mini-games, you'll need to get at least one more pack. Then there's the town customization feature. The reason there's only one board, is because, like in Animal Crossing, it's your persistent town. The same villagers always live there, as well as customizations you can make. Instead of spending happy tickets on mini-games, you can spend them on town features (basically they're public works projects from Animal Crossing: New Leaf). In most cases, they just make your town look pretty, but in other cases, like Brewster's Cafe or the Police Station, they can give you new vignettes to view. Amiibo cards that don't come with the game can be used to have new villagers move into town, which means they'll appear in the vignettes, or they can also MC your game, fulfilling the role Toad usually plays in Mario Party (the three amiibo cards that come with the game alread have their villagers moved into the town when you start, so you don't need to register them immediately.

One more miscillanious complaint I have, is that you can't play with the AI unless you're playing by yourself. If you're playing with just one friend, you can't fill in the extra two slots with AI. Nothing game breaking, but just a little annoying. The game isn't that fun to play by yourself anyway.

Verdict: This is a very very chill board game. If you have friends or family who aren't very familiar with video games and/or like Animal Crossing, they will love this game. Also, if you just want to unwind with friends with a simple board game video game, or want to give children something to do, this is a fairly idiot-proof activity you can sit them with. That's really all this game is trying to do: It's not trying to be Mario Party. I think it does it fairly well. If the above situations describe ones you find yourself in regularly, this game is probably a decent choice for you :)

Probably not worth the 50 or 60 bucks you'll pay for a new copy though. Used it's 30 bucks, and then you'd need another 8 at the least for a used amiibo, so 40 is a much better price.

sorry to say I'm the only person on earth who liked this game. it sucks so much but it got me through a bad spot so unfortunately i love it.

its repetitive and its nothing like Mario Party (WHICH IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN... like how do you mess that up)

anyway.