New Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival details, including Happy Home Designer interactions

Although the two upcoming Animal Crossing games are separate entities, there are some shared features between them.

New details surrounding Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival were revealed today during Nintendo Treehouse Live, following the game's announcement yesterday at Nintendo's Digital Event. One of these is that amiibo Card save data from Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer can be read in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. Boards can be populated with specific characters using amiibo Cards, and if you've designed a home for that character, it too will be added to the board as a way of customizing the experience.

As the game adopts a calendar system by which board events cater to, every turn means a day's passing in the month. Some days will add green event spaces to the board for limited-time interactions, such as when Katie visits the town or Crazy Redd opens up his Card Shop. Animal Crossing fans will also be familiar with Joan, the turnip-selling boar, and she too appears in the game on Sundays to offer players turnips at changing prices. Following her appearance, the board will have turnip prices listed on each space, offering players several opportunities to sell for profit at some point that week before they rot.

One other feature to the board gameplay has to do with the Gyroids stationed at the corners of the board. Interacting with a Gyroid will net you one quadrant of a four-part stamp, which will offer a reward of some kind once complete.

Nintendo Treehouse staff teased there are more components to the game that they can't talk about yet (perhaps the mini-games that are said to be part of the experience), but by all appearances, Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is looking to channel the spirit of the franchise for a non-traditional, more structured style of gameplay.