Animal Crossing players are creating inventive mini games in New Horizons

The games show what a little ingenuity and surprisingly powerful tools can help create.

After the upgrading and building is done in your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, it’s time to start thinking about exactly how to set up your island, and how to make the most of the wealth of tools provided by the game. For me, a big part of Animal Crossing is having an entertaining island for my friends to visit, and I’m not alone in thinking that. Here’s a collection of some of the coolest and most interesting ideas I’ve seen others use in the game.

Treasure Hunt

Whether you love Pokemon, Link, or just hiding flowers, setting up a treasure hunt on your island is a blast. All you have to do is make the images in the Custom Designs App before placing them around your island. It’s good to have a showcase of the exact number of hidden objects so people can tick off the ones they find. If you’d like to make the game more structured, you can organise all your friends to do the hunt at the same time,  seeing whoever can get a picture of each one and submit them to Twitter first.

Musical Chairs

Depending on the effort you put in, musical chairs can be quite complex, with a few different approaches available to you. You could make several different areas with decreasing number of seats, moving from one to the next as you eliminate players, or, alternatively, you could make one large area and slowly remove them. Either way will be fun! One player (the host) gets to play an instrument and be the judge to ensure players are following the rules. Once the instrument is put away by using the down arrow on the joy-con, players must scurry for a seat!

Tag

Tag is an easy game to set up and just requires everyone to have a net. Allow players to ‘tag’ each other by hitting them with a net. You could have everyone tagging each other or have one person designated ‘it’ which switches when someone is tagged. It’s simple, and normally players have all of the items required on them, so it’s far less set up. Just avoid actually hitting your villagers…it might upset them.

Fashion Show

Once you have unlocked the Magic Wand, you can easily set and switch outfits, allowing for a perfect fashion show. Set up your runway, either indoors or outdoors, with plenty of seats, and challenge your friends to walk down the runway. Strike a pose, and walk up – trying out various different outfits depending on the styles you’re going for. You could even do themed fashion shows, seeing everyone’s interpretation of various different motifs with the items they have. Label will eat her heart out.

Parkour Course

Once you can terraform, there is a huge opportunity to build up an epic parkour course for you and your friends to navigate their way through. Designing areas to jump, climb, overcome – decorated with various beautiful features – can be really fun for your friends to run through. You can even do races to see who can get through the course the fastest. This project probably takes the most design work but can be very worthwhile!

Fishing Contests

It’s always nice to hold competitions and, as someone who really enjoys fishing, fishing competitions seem very much like my thing. Give everyone a set number of bait and see how many fish they can catch in a specific amount of time or see who has the coolest fish at the end of the time limit. It’s simple but very fun and doesn’t take much effort on the hosts’ part. C.J. won’t mind if your rules aren’t quite the same as his timed contest!

Create a board game

Using the Design App, you can place tiles onto the ground that act as board game tiles, then using the spinner item, you can give everyone a number, representing where they need to move. Some of the tiles in this board game contained an X, which means that that player is then “out”, becoming a spectator. Tiles can have prizes on them to give a treat to your friends. You can really create whatever kind of board game you want, depending on the amount of effort you’d like to put in.

Compete in Olympic Events

Some people are creating small bits of the Olympics in Animal Crossing, while others have created loads of different Olympic events, holding intense tournaments to see who is the best at a variety of games. If you’ve got the time to put into creating an entire Olympics, you’ll have plenty of fun once your friends arrive, and maybe you’ll have something to do instead of waiting until next year’s Olympics!

Entertaining in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can go from small games with friends to sprawling designated game areas on your island, all depending on what you hope to achieve. Hopefully I’ve provided some inspiration for your next Animal Crossing adventure! I’m sure you and your friends will enjoy whatever you do!

Jupiter Hadley is a indie game enthusiast who specializes in Game Jams. She records thousands of games a year on her YouTube channel and writes for various websites online. If you wish to contact Jupiter, you can find her on twitter @Jupiter_Hadley or support her on Patreon. You can find all of her work at www.Jupiterhadley.com