It’s been a while since I went into my Animal Crossing game. I was doing it through January to create little Snowboys. This is the last one for the year, and probably forever. The little game that helped me get through the pandemic has just about reached the end for me. I know it was originally aimed at kids, and I’m old enough (and my kids are young enough) that I watched both of my daughters play very early versions of this game.

The Snowboy puzzle is the last thing I managed to solve so that I could consistently create “perfect” snowboys without even thinking about it. Every time you create a perfect snowboy you get a large snowflake. All snowboys last three more days after creation, so you can get a maximum of four large snowflakes. If you come back the next day and create a second perfect snowboy, the process starts again, and runs in parallel with any existing snowboys. You can, if you play every day, get four large snowflakes every day until you get tired of making snowboys or collecting large snowflakes. And of course the large snowflakes allow you to make DIY winter items.

I’ve been playing Animal Crossing on the Switch Lite that my oldest daughter gave me as a gift back in 2020, and I don’t ever intend to give it up. It was a sweet gift and I intend to cherish it for as long as possible.

Another New Years Eve Day! How wonderful. To celebrate I visited Animal Crossing after leaving it alone for some time. I was a big player during the pandemic, but I dropped it except for the occasional check just to see what happens in a virtual environment like Animal Crossing when it’s allowed to go “fallow.” So far nothing out of the unusual. I did do a little bit of cleanup, moving items around and minor changes elsewhere.

For example, back around the first of December, I put some Christmas ornaments out front of my cottage. Animal Crossing allows for the storage of items, so after making the ornament trees several Decembers ago, I just pull them out when I need them. Same for the door decoration.

I still have my robot and Apollo Saturn 5 model in the common area, but I moved them a bit to allow better walking between and around them. Of course no photo of Animal Crossing would be complete without a photo bombing from a floating balloon.

I reached a point a while back where I’d completed just about everything; I’ve got over 20 million bells and 800,000 Nook Miles. No need to travel, and nothing left I want to purchase and build. And after purchasing the Happy Home Paradise DLC, I’ve built the minimum number of homes and unlocked all the island buildings in the section, so going back in is now a bit of a chore instead of something new to explore.

I won’t give it up or delete it, considering how many hours invested in all aspects of the game. Now it’s become an irregular way to relax, where I fire it up about once/month on average.