Mobile game Canal Towns is luring Animal Crossing players by building towns in Ming dynasty China

Indie mobile game Canal Towns is topping the free mobile game charts in China

Players liken it to the hit Nintendo game Animal Crossing, with some saying they’ve ditched the Switch to play it

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In Canal Towns, players build towns in Ming dynasty China. Picture: Coconut Island Games

Published: 10:15am, 23 Jul 2020Updated: 10:15am, 23 Jul 2020

Many gamers around the world are still absorbed in building up virtual islands in this year’s hot Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But in China, where Animal Crossing has been removed from e-commerce sites, gamers are turning to a different experience: building virtual riverside towns in the Ming dynasty-era simulation game titled Canal Towns.

The hit new mobile game has been called a Chinese-style agricultural version of Animal Crossing, but it bears a closer resemblance to the classic SimCity games. Canal Towns tasks players with building and managing towns in a region south of the Yangtze River, referred to as Jiangnan in Chinese. The game’s setting isn’t given a specific date, but the Ming dynasty ran from 1368 to 1644.

Like many similar simulation games, Canal Town players participate in and build up their own towns and economies. They need to direct virtual residents to grow crops and build facilities for residential and commercial use. They also need to earn virtual money and expand their towns.

“What attracted me about Animal Crossing was building an island, but I couldn’t afford a Switch, so I came to play Canal Towns,” one Weibo user said. “Every time there is a new building, I would try and build it, and then spend three or four hours rearranging [the town].”

Players can arrange the layout of their towns however they want. Picture: Coconut Island Games

Since it launched in mainland China on July 2, Canal Towns has topped the free game charts on Apple’s iOS app store in China and has become a trending topic on the microblogging site Weibo multiple times. Players are also giving it rave reviews on the popular game review site Taptap. Canal Towns currently has a rating of 8.2 out of 10 from more than 21,000 reviews.

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