How to Play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp RIGHT NOW

By now you’ve undoubtedly seen or heard the news about Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which was the subject of its very own Nintendo Direct this week. Nintendo walked through some of the gameplay and features and more or less set the mobile gaming world aflutter since the game appears to hit the sweet spot between faithfulness to the series and the traditional rhythms of mobile.

Plus, it’s just so darn cute!

The only bummer is that we all have to wait about a month, since the worldwide release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is slated for late November. Except that’s not entirely true. The waiting part, we mean.

The game is already live in soft launch on iOS in select countries, one of which happens to be Australia. We also know how to create App Store accounts in other countries because we’ve written about that sort of thing before. We highly recommend you read that entire article (and simply sub in Australian for Canadian as needed), but we’ll highlight the things you’ll need here:

• A fake Australian address, which you can create with the help of sites like fakenamegenerator.com.
• A valid email address, so either create a new one or use some tricks to utilize an existing one more than once. For example, if your Gmail address is ‘[email protected],’ you can actually use ‘[email protected]’ as a different address for Apple ID purposes even though it works as the same email addy when messages are sent to it.
• The ability to remember the most important step, which is NOT to tap ‘Next’ after you select Australia as your region during the account creation process. If you do, you’ll end up having to enter a valid payment method for the country in question, and since we began this whole process presuming you don’t live in Australia, that’s no good.

As a follow-up, once created, your Australian App Store account will only be good for games that are free to download and you won’t be able to make any in-app purchases. Happily, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is a free game, and you’ll be able to use the time between now and November to decide if you want to make any IAPs — provided you remember to re-download the game from your home country once its live.

There’s also one additional step since our original article was written that is new to iOS 11, which is that you’ll be asked if you want to save your password for free items. It appears you need to tap ‘No’ to be able to download free games with an account created in this fashion.

For you Android users, we’ll just say that there are ways you could play Animal Crossing right now too, but we don’t feel comfortable explaining them here because of the risk you take to your phone or tablet. We’ll just say that they are out there and caveat emptor if you decide to search them out. It’s also important to note that however you play it, the game is in soft launch, so the finished release can and probably will be different in some ways than the build you can try out right now.

There may never be a cure for the impatience you feel while waiting for a new game, but this is kind of the next best thing. Have fun with Pocket Camp if you decide to take the plunge, because we intend to do just that!

Nick Tylwalk

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Nick Tylwalk enjoys writing about video games, comic books, pro wrestling and other things where people are often punching each other, regaardless of what that says about him. He prefers MMOs, RPGs, strategy and sports games but can be talked into playing just about anything.