How to Play Animals and Coins Game: Beginner's Guide
In Animals and Coins, you’re put in charge of your very own island village. By building bridges to other islands, you can collect gold coins that you can use to upgrade and expand your domain. The gameplay is simple, but charming, and combined with the social elements that allow you to raid your friends’ villages, Animals and Coins have been a hit that’s captured millions of players since its release in 2021.
Game Overview
Animals and Coins’ core gameplay brings several elements together:
- Bridge Building: This is the “main” gameplay of the game, and primarily how you can earn coins and progress
- Village Management: Upgrade your islands to advance levels
- Raiding: Attacking other people’s villages to steal their coins
- Deck-Building: Gathering collectible cards and completing themed card sets for huge bonuses
Getting Started with Bridge Building
The bridge-building gameplay loop is simple, but can be super addictive. Tap and hold to start constructing a bridge, then release at the right moment to drop a bridge with just enough length to get to the other side.
If you manage to time it just right and build a perfect bridge that isn’t too long or too short, you can get bonuses, including extra coins and power-ups. Build them three times in a row, and the game will unlock an “auto-mode”, letting you automatically build perfect bridges for a short time.
Pay Attention to Your Energy
Being good at Animals and Coins is all about managing your energy well. You get 50 free energy points daily, and each bridge you build costs 1 point. To get the most out of each play session, you need to strike a nice balance between spending and saving points.
Fortunately, the game gives you plenty of ways to earn more energy besides waiting for it to refill. You can get a small amount of extra energy by watching ads, or you can earn more as a reward by playing minigames.
Use Your Bet Multiplier Smartly
In the game, you can “bet” energy to increase your odds of getting bigger rewards. So instead of spending one energy, you can bet three extra energy points (x3) to get three times the reward.
Here’s a table for easier visualization:
The phrase “high risk, high reward” applies here. If you bet 100 energy points on a single bridge, you may get 100 times the rewards should you succeed. But if you fail? That’s 100 energy points wasted. This is why you need to be smart about betting.
If your energy store is below 1,000 points, the maximum you should bet is x5. You shouldn’t go beyond x10 unless you’ve about 5,000 points stocked up.
Managing Your Coins and Other Resources
Even more important, your energy store is your coin reserve. It’s literally the name of the game, after all!
Gold coins let you upgrade your island and progress through the game, and are also how your performance is ranked on the leaderboard. Just like energy, you also need to keep a close eye on how many coins you have, and it’s for one reason: raids.
The more coins you keep in your balance, the bigger your potential loss when people (eventually) start raiding you. That’s why pro players have a tip: calculate the total amount of coins you’ll need to save in order to fully upgrade an island, then save and upgrade in one fell swoop. Upgrading one piece at a time opens you up to attacks, and if the hit lands, you’ll have to spend more coins to repair the damage.
Protecting Your Islands with Shields
Of course, you don’t have to sit and take the hit if someone raids your islands, and it’s all thanks to an item called Shields. You can hold three Shields maximum; each can automatically block one attack attempt on your village.
Before you’re set to upgrade your island, or if you’re holding a big balance of millions of coins, you should always make sure your Shields are topped up. You can earn more Shields by playing the game.
Take Advantage of Minigames
There’s more to Animals and Coins than building your village and laying bridges. Everyday, the game has several events and minigames for you to play, like Jackpot Sammy and Piñata Pandemonium. By doing them, you can earn extra energy points, coins, and other exclusive rewards and power-ups.
A notable “minigame” that’s a permanent part of Animals and Coins is deck-building. Sometimes you’ll come across themed collectible cards as you play the game. If you collect all the cards in a set, you’ll be richly showered with rewards.
Play with Your Friends
After connecting your game account with Facebook, you can play together with your friends. You’ve two choices here: either raid and loot their coin reserve (if you’re feeling cheeky), or trade collectible cards with them to complete your card sets faster. You can also compete and see who has a more impressive village or a larger coin balance!
Basic Strategy Tips
Think such a simple game as Animals and Coins doesn’t have much in the way of strategy? That’s where you’d be wrong! If you want to rise to the top of the leaderboard and beyond, here’s a basic strategy to use:
- Conserve your energy – Energy is how you build bridges and progress through the game. However, you only get 50 energy points each day, so get the most out of your energy points by practicing perfect bridge timing.
- Pick rich targets to raid – Why waste your energy on raiding someone with 2,000 coins when you could go for folks with 2 million?
- Shield yourself! – Imagine how frustrating it would be to lose millions of coins after spending hours collecting them because you forgot to check your shields. That’s why… don’t forget!
- Don’t skip the deck-building minigame – It’s not as fun as bridge building, but finishing a card set can give your coin balance a major boost, along with exclusive rewards and bonuses.
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s more to Animals and Coins than just cartoonish animals, bridge-building, and coin collecting. If you want to win and get rich fast in the game, there’s quite a bit of strategy and resource management involved. Good thing the game’s free!