Navigating Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival’s Stalk Market

Something unexpected happens the more you play Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. The game gradually scales in difficulty. The board develops new pathways, as players spend Happy Tickets on additional features like the Cafe or Police Station, as a more minor adjustment. The Stalk Market, however, ends up experiencing the most alterations.

Sow Joan comes to every Animal Crossing game on Sunday mornings to sell turnips, and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is no different. On each Sunday, Joan comes to sell turnips, with the price set between 80-120 bells for each bundle of 10. On Monday, the Stalk Market opens and remains open until Saturday. The price each week can be steady, crashing, or fluctuating, with prices occasionally shifting or the market temporarily closing for a day.

As I’ve invested more time in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, I’ve noticed greater variation in the Stalk Market. In my first few games, there’d be little to no variation during the week. Perhaps the price would increase slightly or crash one a month midweek, but it was nothing dramatic. However, on my sixth game I noticed far more irregularities. While steady prices seemed to be the norm and most likely option for the initial prices, it seemed every week would see the market rise and fall, and there would absolutely be one day each month where the Stalk Market was inexplicably closed.

It’s a welcome change and adds quite a bit of challenge to Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. After all, the key to winning the game is happiness. Happy points are earned by stopping at spaces on the board and every 1,000 bells you have at the end of the game “buys” you one additional happy point.

Yet despite this added challenge, it doesn’t change the best strategy for hoarding enough money to win the game. The best way to win is to go all in. It can be risky, especially if the market crashes, but taking a chance can mean assuring victory for yourself within the first week of the game.

The last time I played Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, the board was December. The week of Christmas, I went all-in on turnips. I spent 29,250 bells to buy 250 turnips at 117 bells each. It looked like I had cost myself the game when Monday rolled around, as the Stalk Market crashed. However, on Present Day Jingle decided to raise turnip prices across the board as a gift to all players. At the end of that turn, I landed on a space where Turnips were worth 690 bells. I was a bell-ionaire!

While such luck is out of the ordinary, it happens often enough in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival to encourage everyone to always invest in the Stalk Market. Buy as many turnips as you possibly can. When the week starts out with fluctuating prices, sell the lot as soon as you end up on a space with a good price. On steady weeks, sell about half of your stash on a place where you’ll make a profit and hold on to the rest just in case the market changes.

Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is absolutely a relaxed and leisurely adventure, but don’t mistake that for an absence of strategy. More cunning players can assert their dominance early on when they take chances with Sow Joan.