Building up an island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes a lot of time and resources to complete and offers plenty of ways to do so with friends. However, the game is designed only for cooperative play rather than competitive.
That hasn't stopped players, though. Plenty of players have come up with different games to have fun, and most of those ways involve some sort of competition through the creative use of tools like the terrain editor.
It takes a while before the terrain editor becomes available to customize the land on the island, but there are also plenty of games to play without it. Musical chairs, hide and seek, and catching competitions, to name a few. Musical chairs can easily be done by using tree stumps or any number of the different chairs that can be crafted, with the music coming from a radio or playing an instrument.
There's also hide and seek, which doesn't require any furniture or equipment at all. Letting players try and hide behind a tree, house, or even inside the museum. The boundaries could be the island or museum or include both for more of a challenge. A scavenger hunt is another option. By burying different items around an island, players have to dig them up and bring back the requested items. To make it even more challenging, players can bury decoy items.
There are different catching competitions, including ones for fish, insects and even people. This can be done without any tools or crafted items but would be a bit trickier to keep track of. Some items will make it a lot easier, such as the timer. There is a timer in the game players can activate that will record time and how many fish have been caught. The timer is similar to the one C.J. has for the fishing tournament. If you don't have that timer, it can still be done without it. Each player would set a timer, then would have to screenshot the inventory to see how many fish or insects were caught since they can't be dropped while visitors are on an island.
Catching people in nets is just as simple as hitting them on the head with a net. The nets are not necessarily designed for this, which could lead to some discrepancies, so players will need to decide beforehand what constitutes a clean hit. An arena could easily be made by digging holes around players, or even using a floor pattern to determine the arena. With the terrain editor, try and get a bit fancy to create a pit with elevated land around it to simulate a coliseum and letting them duke it out.
While there are slot machines in the game, they don't do anything aside from spin and produce music. However, there is a colorful spinning wheel. On its own, people would need to guess a number from 1-8 and spin the wheel, but it can be used in addition with the other games you play by spinning it to determine how many minutes the game will last, how many fish needed to catch, or how many rewards players will get.
While this may not be what Nintendo had in mind when they created the game, it has certainly evolved into something that players are making competitive and finding new ways to enjoy the game. Whether playing it on your own or coming up with creative ways to play the game,