The last couple months have been pretty bad, which is the understatement of this new decade. There are silver linings and rays of light in all this darkness, though. One such positive is the immense creativity that so many people have displayed in the ways they work, entertain, and just generally live while largely stuck at home. This creativity was on display in recent days in the popular Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which some players have figured out how to run casinos.
Animal Crossing is one of those games that people either “get” or “don’t get.” New Horizons is the fifth game in the series and has been amazingly successful. Aided in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and people’s desire for escapism, it broke the record for digital copy sales in a single month after its March 20th release, with more than 5 million.
As a gamer myself, Animal Crossing isn’t really my thing, so I guess I’m in the “don’t get it” crowd. But hey, different strokes for different folks. In the game, you control a character that moves to a deserted island. From there, you explore the island, collect items, catch food, craft items, and build a community of other characters.
During the pandemic, Animal Crossing has been a way for people to fantasize through in-game exploration, as well as socialize as they visit each other’s islands.
Animal Crossing also includes an in-game currency, which can be used to purchase premium items. So of course, some players have used their creative entrepreneurial skills to create casinos.
One such player is a Japanese Facebook “gaming video creator” named Mabushii. In a five-hour video, he showed how he built a functioning casino, followed by other Animal Crossing: New Horizons players coming over to gamble.
Nothing in his casino is automated, but nonetheless it’s pretty clever. Mabushii made a series of mats, each with three numbers written on them (2-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-13, 14-16). At the head of the “casino,” he placed two wheels, each containing eight numbered spaces.
Mabushii gets the wheels spinning and players drop money they wish to gamble on a space. It’s similar to roulette, just without a ball. When the bets are placed, Mabushii stops the wheels and adds up the two numbers on which they stop. The resulting sum is the winning number. Mabushii drops money for each winner and collects the money from the losing bets.
And like in roulette, there doesn’t always have to be a winner. In one round I watched, nobody bet on the 5-7 mat and that just so happened to be the range of numbers in which the winning number fell. Mabushii went around and collected all of the wagers.
Other Animal Crossing players have made casinos with slot machines, but those machines were earned from redeeming a code in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, so they are not necessarily available to players who only have Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
